By John Hartman Are you looking for something meaningful to do while you’re cooped up in quarantine? How about spending an hour or two sending letters encouraging potential voters to get to the polls? You can do that through WUUC’s partnership with Vote Forward.
Vote Forward is a national organization who’s core mission is increasing civic participation. Right now, this means writing letters to people who belong to groups such as racial minorities who have historically been under-represented in the electorate compared to their share of the population.
Last year WUUC’s Climate Justice team identified getting out
the vote as one of their major goals for the year in order to increase the
chances of getting people elected who support the climate justice agenda and to
increase the voting power of groups most impacted by climate change.
In January we partnered with Vote Forward based on their reputation of developing quality lists of under-represented voters and a user-friendly letter-writing program. When the coronavirus hit and people started quarantining, the Climate Justice team thought it would be a good time to launch Vote Forward as part of the WUUC Social Distancing Service Project — an Advocates for Social Justice initiative.
We set an initial goal of signing up WUUC members to write 1,000 letters. We achieved that goal in the first 10 days. We have increased our goal to 2,100 letters. Want to write a few letters?
Here’s how the program works. You don’t actually write a whole letter. Most of the letter is pre-printed. Your biggest job is inserting a personal message in the body of the letter telling the recipient why you vote in every election. You sign the letter, address and stamp the envelope and — voila — you’re done.
Help us reach our goal. Write a few letters. Here’s how. Go to the Google docs spreadsheet. Put in your name, address, email, phone number and the number of letters you want to write (multiples of 50, please). We will print out the letter template for the number of letters you signed up for and provide stamps, envelopes and instructions. A packet will be delivered to your front door within a few days of signing up. When you’re done writing the letters, we’ll pick them up and be sure they get mailed in late October.
By Donna Johnson The new heroes of our sudden move to online Zoom services at WUUC are a dedicated group we lovingly call ZoomKeepers (thanks to Karen MacKenzie for this word), who serve as Zoom tech hosts each week, and ZoomMates (thanks to Jane Flood for this word) who serve as back up Zoom hosts each week.
Our current ZoomKeepers are Lanny Commeree, Jane Flood, Sarah Niwa, and David Goss-Grubbs. Winny Schnitzler, Karen MacKenzie and Ava Priest are ZoomKeepers in training. We are very grateful.
This intrepid group has figured out ways to make our services smoother each week as, behind the scenes, they follow a detailed script and switch rapidly between slides, music, and speakers. The group attends trainings and weekly practices and shares new ways to make Zoom work better for WUUC.
We have developed a ZoomKeeper training manual (huge thanks
to Lanny!!). Please let me know if you
too would like to be a ZoomKeeper/ ZoomMate.
What insights can or should we take from the presence of these environmental silver linings?
A few come to mind and I hope that you will take some time to consider others.
I suspect that the idea of telework will get quite a boost from this period in history. Telework is not a good fit in every situation, for sure, and it can be disruptive of home life. Yet, to the extent that it works, telework offers some relief from long commutes, heavy use of gasoline and associated emissions, and traffic-related tragedies.
Although Zoom and other video conferencing services are not perfect, they are certainly better than not interacting at all and they open possibilities for staying in community across distances and across health conditions that could not have been possible earlier. In some instances, it feels that Zoom and similar technologies can help us get better in taking turns in conversation and in bringing greater equity to patterns of conversation.
Videography of sermons and events is not perfect, but it is also better than not participating. Again, the technology opens possibilities for staying in community when distance or health do not permit in-person interaction.
That’s a short list, some of which are directly applicable to WUUC, and some to life more generally.
Take care and be as safe as possible under the circumstances.
By Chris Smith The name “Katherine” is a combination of the words “Kath” and “Er-In”. Neither of those words mean anything individually. But when you put them together, you form an amazing woman.
Katherine Smith was born somewhere in the boonies of Ohio, surrounded by a loving but certainly goofy family. But despite the uh… SUPER EXCITING happenings in Troy, Ohio, Katherine went to school at the University of Pennsylvania. (That’s the one known for academics, not football.) There Katherine met the love of her life… something called “abstract mathematics.”
Kate pursued that love throughout most of her life. First in
graduate school at the University of Washington, studying Computer Science, and
later at Microsoft where she now works as a Program Manager for the SQL Server
product.
Of course, abstract math won’t help you open jars or keep
you warm when it is a — at least to Katherine — chilly 77 degrees out. So she
decided to get married to a guy named Chris.
Now, her heart is no longer stirred by “formal operational semantics,” but instead by her “Smith boys”: Grant (5), Neil (3), and Chris (no seriously, the legos are for the kids, put those down).
Katherine is a kind, loving woman who strives to fill her family with the same sense of love and goofiness that she grew up with. (Although in a much more awesome place than “wherever” Ohio.)
She is thrilled to become member of WUUC, and relishes the sense of tight-knit community. All of her Smith boys love her greatly, and are confident that you — the WUUC congregation — will love her too.
