By Grace Simons They’re coming back! Students will return to Maywood Hills Elementary in just a few weeks! It’s time for us to get back in gear and provide kids who need it with food to take home over the weekends. That means getting back in the habit of adding an item or two for ‘Totes’ when you do your regular shopping.
If you aren’t familiar with the program – or just need a refresher, here are the basics:
Totes To Go is a system through which schools in our general area identify students who are at risk of missing meals over weekends, when school breakfast and lunch programs aren’t available. We know that hungry kids can’t learn well, so we provide a variety of food items that are placed in a backpack for each of those students to take home with them on Fridays. They are mostly single serving items as the living situations of the students may be unstable. WUUC has been participating in the program for many years, but COVID put us on hold. Now we’re starting up again!
Each month we collect: Individual shelf stable milk boxes, Canned meat or fish, Individual serving cereal boxes, Peanut butter, Snacks, Juice boxes, Crackers, Single serving canned fruit, One-dish meals, Granola bars
We again hope to support 15 students. That means we need 60 of each ‘individual’ size items, 30 canned meat or fish, 15 jars of peanut butter and 15 sleeves of crackers (usually salt crackers or Ritz-type).
Please bring your items by Sunday, Aug 29. They can be left in the new shed on the west side of the church building. Once we are back in person we’ll use the baskets inside the church. Questions? Contact Grace Simons or John Hartman, co-coordinators.
By John Hartman My wife, daughter, son-in-law, two grandsons and I recently visited Glacier National Park. This was late June, so right in the middle of the hot stretch we all suffered through. Even though it was hot and crowded we had a wonderful time. The lakes and streams were refreshing. The mountains were awe inspiring, even through a slight haze. I never grow tired of the Going-to-the-Sun Road — a miracle of engineering and one of the most beautiful highways in the world.
It wasn’t long after our visit to Glacier that I came across an article by Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana. She has spent the last 30 years researching how bark beetles are decimating pine forests. She also made a recent trip to Glacier. I quote from her article:
“Glacier National Park. 97F in June. Little snow left. 75F degree water. Glaciers disappearing. This is what we hear. But the worst is what most never see.”
Loss of snow and warm lake water so early in the season is devastating to fish and algae. The hot temperatures cause early blooming and wilting of the flowers. The bees and hummingbirds that depend on them are in trouble; their food is gone.
“There have been total losses of a lot of baby birds this year. You see these ospreys and eagles sitting on top of the trees in their nests and those young, they just can’t take the heat. Year after year of that and you lose your birds.”
“People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because they’ve moved too far off shore. They’re emaciated, they’re starving to death. We are at a point that there’s nothing untouched.”
“I had gone from being an ecologist to a coroner.”
One of the joys of my visit to Glacier was teaching my 5 year old grandson, Miles, about wildflowers. We walked down the trail and I pointed out a wildflower and gave it a name. Pretty soon he was happily going down the trail pointing out the wildflowers he knew.
What can you do about climate change? It can be changing laws or it can be teaching a child to appreciate nature. Just do something.
Hello, I’m Jane Flood. I am a school teacher. I started the Seattle Pacific University’s teacher preparation program in 2015. The program took a year, my first class was in 2016.
As I was transitioning out of my military career I was looking for something that I would find fulfilling. I started volunteering in Sebastian’s first-grade classroom. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed working with the kids. His teacher was amazing; she really helped Sebastian, and I wanted to help other children like she did.
Last year, I had a student who was pretending to read. I knew he was bright, so we started reading together one-on-one. We read article after article, and we chatted about the information we had read. It was really fun, and we got to know each other pretty well. At one point we were reading a really fun book together. He thought the rest of the class would enjoy it, too, so we started over with the full class. He got all the lower readers to read dialogue for the characters in the book while I narrated. At the end of the year, he sent me a thank-you note. He confessed he had never enjoyed reading before, and he thanked me for spending the time and giving him a love of books.
I thought teaching was going to be an easy job, but it is intense. We spend many unpaid hours every week planning lessons and collecting materials. When we have a student who is not progressing, we work extra hard to try and understand them and to figure out how to move them forward. I love that challenge, and when you see a kid do something they would never have attempted earlier, it feels great knowing you just changed someone’s life.
Join us on Friday, July 30 at 7 p.m. at the WUUC Church Campout at Manchester State Park in Port Orchard for a meeting of the WUUC Nonfiction Book Club. We will discuss “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson. RSVP to Alaine. RSVP not required, but helpful for planning purposes.
If you aren’t attending the campout, but are still interested in reading and discussing the book, consider volunteering to lead a Zoom discussion on the same day!
“‘Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents’ [is] an extraordinary document, […] an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away. I told more than one person, as I moved through my days this past week, that I was reading one of the most powerful nonfiction books I’d ever encountered. —Dwight Garner, New York Times Review of Books
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.
.– Adapted from an Amazon review
Four times a year, the WUUC Book Discussion Group gathers to read and talk about a nonfiction book. You only attend the meetings about books that interest you, so we end up with a different group of participants every time. We meet to connect and talk about a book in depth. Anyone is welcome to suggest a book and/or lead a discussion. Contact Alaine to RSVP, suggest a book, or offer to host a future discussion.
I conduct blood drives. I coordinate with BloodWorks and churches in our interfaith group to schedule drives and sign up donors.
I was a regular blood donor when I lived in Honolulu, starting about 40 years ago. After I moved to Woodinville in 1992, I looked around for blood donating opportunities and discovered that WUUC already had a program for this. WUUC had recently joined with 5 other churches to form an interfaith group. I became the coordinator for the blood drive effort on behalf of Cottage Lake Interfaith Partners, CLIP.
In Honolulu, I attended a self-help seminar which, among other things, encouraged people to get involved in community service. My personal blood type is AB negative which is the rarest of all the standard blood types — only .5% of the population has it. This blood type makes me the universal plasma donor. Any other blood type can receive my plasma, and it can be frozen and stored for a year. Emergency rooms keep it on hand for trauma victims who need a quick transfusion of plasma without taking the time to check their blood type for a match.
One of the things I have found most gratifying in doing this is the connection I have made with so many people. A memorable event occurred when we had a blood drive scheduled for a few days after 9/11/2001. People were desperate to help, and flooded into Wooden Cross Lutheran where the drive was being held. We handled about 85 donors that day before running out of supplies and having to turn many others away.
Statistics show that 70% of us will need blood sometime in our life, yet only about 5% of the population gives blood.
Being a blood donor is the easiest, quickest and most powerful thing we can do to benefit our community. The most amount of time you could spend in one year giving whole blood (6 times max) would be about 6 hours. Whole blood is separated into its 3 main components (plasma, platelets, and red blood cells). Each donation could be given to 3 different patients depending on their individual needs, so your 6 annual donations have the potential of benefitting 18 people.
I think of it as the lazy man’s way to save the world.
By Cora Goss-Grubbs Learn the do’s and don’ts of bystander intervention in this virtual, interactive workshop designed to help learn and practice the skills of reacting in the moment to street harassment. Rather than utilize a one-size-fits-all approach, we also explore context and positionality to help give each individual the tools needed.
The training is led by Courtney Wooten, founder of Suburbia Rising. She has also served as an equity consultant in the Pacific Northwest, focusing on educational spaces, family engagement and faith communities. She serves as a lead organizer with the Edmonds Neighborhood Action Coalition, sits on two Snohomish County Commissions, and is a board member for the Creative Dance Center.
There’s no cost for this training – it’s brought to you by WUUC’s Racial Justice Task Force (RJTF)! The training is limited to 30 attendees. You’ll receive a confirmation and meeting link after you sign-up at https://forms.gle/txFpZXA4jtLoo5ZQ9, and we will start a waiting list if needed. Contact Pam Green at pgreen@wuuc.org with any questions.
Sunday Special Collections
In May our congregants raised $575 for Circle Faith Future, an organization chosen by the WUUC youth group. Circle Faith Future provides a healing presence to organizations and communities in Oregon, Washington and Idaho by offering chaplaincy, presentations, workshops, crisis intervention, and/or local conversations addressing climate change, incarceration, poverty, trauma, racism and healing.
On July 18 our special collection will support EarthGen (formerly Washington Green Schools), a nonprofit organization that equips youth to grow their power as change-makers for a healthy environment. Through EarthGen’s science-based, action-oriented programs, young people gain the knowledge, skills, and experience they need to become leaders for climate solutions and environmental justice.
The ASJ Committee thanks WUUC members and friends for their generous support of our monthly special collections, which take place during services on the third Sunday of every month. Instructions for giving are posted during the service, and you can also donate anytime the following week at https://onrealm.org/wuuc/-/give/now, or by sending a check to WUUC at P.O. Box 111, Woodinville, WA 98072. Please make checks out to WUUC and write “ASJ Special Collection” in the notes.
