by Nina Douglass, South Bay Food Pantry Volunteer

The parking lot of 907 Broadway is like that of any other Chula Vista strip mall on weekdays.  On Saturdays, however, the lot is transformed by hundreds of South Bay Food Pantry volunteers and clients.  Volunteers arrive by 8am to receive and stage hundreds of pounds of canned and other dry goods, fresh produce and Starbucks bakery items from the big Feeding San Diego truck. By then, many pantry guests are already waiting for the 9am distribution of numbers which serve to organize the line-up for the 11am - 12:30pm food distribution.  The few trees at the site provide welcome shade for people waiting to collect their food.
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by Nina Douglass, South Bay Food Pantry Volunteer

When asked what inspired her to found the South Bay Food Pantry, FUUSD member Maureen McNair has recalled noticing signs of insufficient access to nutritious food among the elementary school children she taught in that neighborhood.  Maureen’s recognition that chronic food insecurity in the South Bay is pervasive led her to address the problem through the creation of the pantry.
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Second Thursdays Spring dates are May 12, 5 pm - 6:15 pm. Black, Indigenous and People of Color Leaders rooted in the Unitarian Universalist congregations are invited to take part in this monthly, virtual gathering. This space is created by the UUA explicitly for people identifying as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPoC). Register online at uua.org/leadership/events/taproot-feb-2022.

The Reopening Team would like to share some changes we're making.  But before getting to the practical changes in our COVID policies and procedures, we’d like to take a moment to share a little of what we learned from our recent survey and frame the work that we’re doing in the context of our UU Principles and Values.  
 
We’re overjoyed to report that 292 people responded to our survey and that the responders accurately represented the demographic makeup of our congregation and both of our campuses.  It is fair to say that this is the largest response and most accurate representation of any survey at First UU in recent times.  Thanks to church member Dr. Rebecca Fielding-Miller for the masterful work done in creating it and analyzing the data! Please watch the Window for an upcoming forum to discuss survey results.
 
A few key takeaways:
      ·         About half of our congregation at each campus identifies as “high-risk.”  And the highest priority named out of all the options given was a desire to protect children and the immunocompromised, and a desire to practice an affirming welcome for all.  It was notable that, despite a strong desire by many to move away from safety practices that can be inconvenient and bothersome, the vast majority of survey responders put the safety needs of others ahead of their own comfort and convenience. 
      ·         Despite increasing pressure (especially felt by staff) to end all mask and distance protocols, the clear majority (roughly 3/4 of responders) said that they were willing or extremely willing to continue masking outdoors, and almost everyone (roughly 90%) reported a desire to wear masks indoors.  It is worth noting that this surprised many of us.  The anecdotal evidence could easily lead one to believe that “everyone is tired of wearing masks” or point to fears that “everyone will leave if we continue masking.”  While these frustrations and fears are not to be dismissed (more on that in a moment), the data shows that most people are willing to wear a mask if it helps protect those people we say we want to protect.  
      ·         Finally, the data shows that we are an extremely well-vaccinated congregation (only two responders report being unvaccinated) and we live in extremely well-vaccinated households.  We have often been asked why we aren’t mandating vaccines or checking for vaccination status. The reality is that it would create quite a lot of additional work (not to mention time at the check-in table) to simply confirm what we already know. 
 
So what does this have to do with our values and mission? We recognize that our church policies are looking less and less like what we experience in the rest of our worlds.  Theaters, schools, other churches and even airplanes have loosened or eliminated protections that we continue to practice.  We know that this can feel frustrating, uncomfortable and maybe even infuriating.  We can’t help but note, however, that if we’re living our values, we should be different from “the outside world.”   As a church, we are called to be a sanctuary in more than name only.  And if we say that we want to protect the most vulnerable among us and dismantle systems that oppress those most marginalized, we should expect our community to be different than other communities and even, in some cases, be uncomfortable.  
 
We also recognize, however, that it is often extremely challenging to balance factual realities with the desires of our hearts.  And these desires themselves are not trivial.  We need the emotional and spiritual nourishment we get from seeing each other face-to-face, and we crave the security and certainty of familiar things - even more so in times that are filled with fear, stress and uncertainty.  And please believe us when we say that those voices that have asked loudly and clearly for a speedier return “to normal” have been heard, and that many of us feel the same yearnings.  We have tried to keep everyone safe knowing that some would think it was too much, and others think it was not enough. This has not been easy for any of us and we greatly appreciate your empathy, patience and grace.  

​So with all that in mind, we have decided to make the following changes in our COVID response policies:
      ·         Effective immediately, masks will now be optional for outdoor activities on both our campuses.  This means that we will no longer require masks for outdoor worship and other outdoor activities, but that individuals are (and always will be) welcome to continue masking.  
      ·         Small groups, including musical ensembles, will soon be able to meet indoors with masks.  Please note that some indoor spaces may take longer to become available than others because they have been used for other purposes during the pandemic and we’ll need time to get them ready for public use again.  Also, the definition of what constitutes a “small group” will be different depending on the size of the space.  For groups that prefer to continue meeting outdoors, those space will remain available for use.  
      ·         Indoor Worship is slightly more complex.  At Hillcrest, we will be working diligently to return to worship in the Meeting House by early July.  We will, however, continue to offer outdoor spaces where people may choose to gather for worship. This timeline is based on the staff’s estimate of how much time it will take to both prepare the space for use and to transition all of the technology from the outdoor tech table to a more permanent indoor space. Like all other indoor activities, worship in the Meeting House will require masks. At South Bay, we will return to indoor worship with masks as soon as spaces are ready.  
 
Finally, we have decided that the Reopening Team no longer needs to function as such.  The responsibility to continue monitoring the situation and adapting policies and procedures in response will now rest solely with the Interim Committee (Exec), though individual members from the Reopening Team may continue to be called on from time to time for their expertise and input.  
 
We appreciate all of you who continue to journey with us in community as we continue to navigate these unprecedented times.  And we look forward to worshiping, celebrating and struggling and growing with you as we continue to make our mission evident and alive in the world.  

By Nina Douglass
​Maureen McNair’s imminent departure to her new home in Northern CA is a seismic event for FUUSD South Bay Food Pantry volunteers and the many clients who have come to know her.  As Deirdre Lonergan notes, “Maureen has been a “FORCE of NATURE because of the massive and persistent energy it took to build this community...”  While the pantry teams will grapple - and perhaps fumble at times - as we adjust to Maureen’s transition, her remarkable leadership and legacy will continue to inspire us.

By Maureen McNair.
​Last month, I bought a condo in a small town in the Sierra foothills. I am going to keep my house in Chula Vista where I have lived for 33 years and remain a member of FUUSD. However, I intend to spend significant time in northern California in a quiet place that is both close to nature and many cultural events. Operating the food pantry requires hands on labor and interacting in person with volunteers and clients. While I will always be the pantry Founder, I am shifting my status to something like Coordinator Emeritus at the end of this month. Various voices will take over this blog starting next week. In addition, I have trained a team of familiar faces to run the pantry. 

By Maureen McNair
Anna Kelley, a Senior at San Diego State University, has been volunteering at our South Bay Food Pantry for nearly two years. “I was looking for ways to get out of my box and serve with others,” she said after her shift bagging donated food from Starbucks last Saturday morning.​It was an hour before the food distribution actually began. Volunteers had already set up outdoor tables and bagged thousands of pounds of oranges, cabbages, potatoes, and Romaine lettuce. Anna will continue volunteering until this August because she “enjoys working with this group of people, especially the community members.”  Anna is referring to the community members who receive food from our pantry on Saturday morning, but come early to volunteer to sort and bag fresh produce and move boxes of dry goods indoors. Those community members vary each week. However, the pantry has an increasingly steady flow of clients who also form part of the backbone of our volunteer team. To protect their privacy, they are not identified in this blog.  

4/15/22 - Our Reopening Team is developing plans for a future in which COVID-19 will likely be endemic and cyclical for the foreseeable future. We are asking members to complete a brief (<5 minute) survey to help us clarify congregational priorities and ensure that our plans are holistic, evidence-based, and grounded in the needs of our community. We will share preliminary results back with the congregation approximately two weeks after the survey closes. Please only take this survey one time; as we have posted this request in several places. Complete the survey 
. (If the link does not work, copy and paste this link into your browser  https://ucsd.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_2rvAFYc2N4HembA )

By Maureen McNair
Sebastian Hochgesang is 9 years old now and a veteran volunteer at the South Bay Food Pantry and Diaper & Period Products Program. Sebastian began volunteering with his mother, Mindy Hochgesang, in 2019 in what was then the Sunday morning free diaper distribution program. One Sunday a month or so, and often on Sundays that fell on a holiday, Sebastian and his mom volunteered together to give away free diapers for babies from 8:15 - 9:15 AM. Mindy explains their volunteer gig gelled for them after three things aligned. She heard from friends who already volunteered at the pantry  “how meaningful it was for them as a family.” Plus, Mindy says, “I had gone to the Social Justice week at Camp de Benneville in summer 2019 (it was a goal of mine to increase my social justice involvement) and I was looking for practical ways to do that -- one that fit in with my life (single working mother) and provided a meaningful opportunity for my son Sebastian (who is now 9) - it's really hard to find volunteer opportunities that meaningfully involve kids.” 

By Maureen McNair
Our South Bay Food Pantry opened in December 2019 with a good-sized volunteer crew of people who regularly attended services at our Chula Vista campus. We displayed food on
shelves in a large closet. Our clients came in to select the food they wanted and shopped for themselves. Then, the covid pandemic hit and inside of a week, almost all the volunteers went into self-quarantine. I decided to try to keep the pantry open, and put together a mostly new set of volunteers who started distributing food from tables we set up in our parking lot. Bella Furth started pitching in
wherever she was needed. One of Bella’s many talents is she can see what needs to be done, then does it. As Bella puts it, she “pretty quickly ended up handling intake, rosters and client record-keeping.” It’s a job Bella does most Saturdays to this day.

Though it's hard for me to believe, my six weeks as your Minister in Residence are already over, and this Sunday is my last one with you. It has been an honor to accompany you for this brief time, and to hear your stories, struggles, and aspirations for this beloved community. You have an interesting and challenging road ahead of you as you navigate what it means to be a religious community in the post-pandemic world. You also have ahead of you the many ways you'll find to heal past conflict and navigate disagreements, and the large decision about whether or not to move in the coming years. I hope you'll let yourselves be guided in all of what's ahead by your sense of mission, asking (in one way or another), Who are we called to be together? What difference do we want it to make, that First UU exists? You have terrific people in leadership - both as staff and as volunteers - and I have great confidence that along with them, your next Minister in Residence and then your new Lead Minister will help you gain clarity and map the path ahead. I'm grateful to have joined my life to yours for this little time, and will be eager to see how your next chapters unfold. With respect and affection, Rev. Kathleen McTigue

Tuesday, March 29th from 6 pm to 8 pm.
​Join us for a discussion on white supremacy culture. Download the Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture.pdf. For the meeting link, please go to our Members Area.

Our thriving South Bay Food Pantry recently went through a major transition. While church activities were solely virtual during the first years of the pandemic, we were fortunate to be able to use two large FUUSD South Bay campus suites to store the dry goods, bread, meat and period products we distribute to the local community every Saturday morning, as well as diapers on Sunday mornings. With the upcoming re-opening of the South Bay campus, we needed to relocate to suite 105, a smaller space than either of the ones we’d been using. Having grown to accommodate some 300 households seeking food each week, how could we adapt our operations to work from this smaller space? And how could we make that move quickly, so that the South Bay worship and social spaces could be restored for in-person use ASAP?

Thank you so much for the welcome on Sunday, as I shared in the service, it was a true joy being with you. I was also very glad to be able to share some information about how UUSC is responding to the growing refugee crisis being created by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
If you would like to support this work, please follow this link to UUSC’s Emergency Response Fund. Gifts coming in now will be used to support both immediate response and long-term partnerships to protect and advance human rights for Ukrainian refugees.
In faith,
Rev. Mary Katherine Morn, UUSC president

PROGRESS: The reopening Team met on Saturday March 5 to review together what we currently know about Covid in our area and the direction things are trending. Based on our discussion we are ready to recommend the following:

• Worship services should continue to be outdoors and masked at least through the rest of March.
• Based on steadily shrinking Covid cases and changed recommendations nationally and in our area, we are comfortable expanding our worship services to include singing and social hour following the service.
• Based on all that we know about Covid transmission and our awareness that some among us still cannot be effectively vaccinated, we recommend that singing outdoors continues to be masked, and that social hour follow “airplane rules,” that is, we remain masked except when actively taking a sip or a bite.
• We recommend that our staff begin working toward an eventual return to indoor worship by reviewing all the infrastructure and staff needs to do so, knowing that after two  years away from what was once “normal”, there will be considerable logistical efforts involved in returning inside.
• Knowing that there are multiple levels of vulnerability among us and widely varying perspectives on risk, we will continue to offer livestreaming as an option even after our eventual return to indoor worship. At that point, we will also offer a third option of viewing worship services from the patio for those wishing to remain outdoors.
• We support our South Bay campus in moving forward at the same pace as the Hillcrest campus, knowing that there are also additional logistical concerns having to do with the Food Pantry. Our staff and volunteers have these issues well in hand.
  

On a key point about infrastructure, skilled people have set up a complex facility outdoors to livestream our worship services. Deciding to move indoors will involve rebuilding all of that in the meeting house. That's a huge effort, hard to undo if an upsurge were to force us back out again. So we're working first on more and more happening outdoors before services move indoors. We'll continue with the livestream option open to everyone, no matter what. We're a solid, loving community. This is a time of trauma recovery, but we're in this together and definitely continuing to make progress.

We'll be back together again for in-person, outdoor worship services on the patio at our Hillcrest campus! Masked, reasonably distanced, and with a clear expectation that all who can do so will be fully vaccinated. This includes a booster.

• But no one is excluded and we'll do no checking about vaccination status.
• All masks must be N95, KN95, or KF94 types, fully covering the nose and mouth. No cloth masks will be allowed. Masks will be provided if needed.
• We trust everyone to use good judgement and we welcome persons of all ages.
• The overall rating for our area and California in general has dropped down to the "Very High" level. It's not down to "High," which we had hoped to reach, but we're convinced by the trends and by the real need for all of us to be together again.
• We know some among us are still struggling, due to being immunocompromised or other issues. We understand. And we hope you will find a comfortable place amidst our decisions.
• Our front-line staff have special, heightened concerns as well. We're trying to reach a balance. We realize we can't avoid all risk and prevent all possibility of infection.
• South Bay presents further issues since there is no designated, regular outdoor space for worship services. We hope the decisions for Hillcrest can guide decisions that will later be made about South Bay's services.
• Any time after resuming in-person services on the 27th we believe it will be OK for outdoor, in-person meetings to resume - in groups of no more than 15 - masked, distanced, and with high expectations about being fully vaccinated.
• Likewise, singing choirs and the handbell choir may exercise their own judgements about resuming practices, while acknowledging the special risks of spreading this air-borne disease through singing. We will not resume congregational singing at this time.
• We're taking some big steps about being together, which makes us happy. But we'll continue to watch many numbers carefully.

By Maureen McNair
 
This past Saturday, pantry volunteers gave away food to a record 252 heads of household. Surely, we broke the 1,000 person barrier when we look at how many people are actually receiving the food we distribute. Our prior record had been 226 heads of household.
 
Our food pantry distributes food to a lot of individuals and families. On Saturdays, we track the food we give out to the “heads of household” who actually walk through our food distribution line. The heads of household report to us when they enroll how many people live in their homes.