Dear Congregants

The Social Justice Team is pleased to announce that the Church Board has approved a process for consulting the congregation on focus areas for Social Justice in the next few years.

The process begins with sharing the recommendations the Social Justice Team made to the Board. In essence, the recommendations are to:

1. Continue our work in the three focus areas approved by the congregation in 2015
   • • Partnership with the Eva Rothwell Centre
     • Affordable Housing
     • Sexual and Gender Justice
2. Add a fourth focus area: Climate Action.

In a circle meeting, at noon, after the church service on February 13, 2022, congregants will have a chance to ask questions, and provide feedback, suggestions, and revisions.

Congregants will have time to contact members of the SJ team individually to get questions answered and to give feedback and input. Emails can also be sent to socialjustice@uuhamilton.ca

Following the circle meeting, if there are significant revisions to the suggested focus areas, those revised recommendations will go back to the Board for consideration and approval.

The last step will be an opportunity for the congregation to vote on the final proposals, hopefully at the annual meeting on March 27, 2022.  The detailed recommendations are:

Social Justice Recommendations

1. That the congregation continue with our current three focus areas, Eva Rothwell Centre, Affordable Housing and Gender and Sexual Justice which all had strong support in a February 2021 congregational survey. This includes continuing our relationship with two organizations to which we are committed, Eva Rothwell and Sacajawea Non-Profit Housing Inc. Continuing with these three focus areas was strongly supported in a survey conducted by the Social Justice Team in February 2020, to which 101 congregants responded. There remains engaged leadership and volunteers in all three areas.
2. That the congregation add a fourth focus area, Climate, because
   • • It helps the congregation fulfill the strategic plan, which several times asserts a commitment to the Earth.
     • There is a team of people ready to act on that focus area, including people who participated in a UU-UNO climate change event in the spring;
     • It had significant support in the February 2021 survey done by social justice.
     • It builds on the continuing work of our gardening team to create a Carolinian garden, of our property team to reduce energy use, and our other pre-2015 work that saw us recognized as a Green Sanctuary and a Climate Change Champion and won us the 2013 Greening Sacred Spaces Award.
     • It builds on the Seventh Principle work in our CYRE curriculum.
     • It is an essential and urgent issue, especially for younger Canadians, a demographic our movement and congregation need to appeal to and support.
3. That Roberta Weiss continues to explore ways we might engage with the issue of income and wealth inequality, including integrating that issue into our focus areas.
4. That in our work in four focus areas, the congregation and Social Justice Team look for the ways to work in areas where our focus area issues overlap and intersect, and where they intersect with anti-racist and anti-oppression efforts in keeping with our Eighth Principle.
5. That as the congregation applies the eighth principle lens to all our work, to explicitly include the issue of class, recognizing how fundamentally income and wealth are enmeshed in all our focus areas, and how large a challenge classism can be to our congregation and movement and our openness to non-members. The Gender and Sexual Justice work explicitly involves efforts in keeping with our 8th principle commitment to anti-oppression work.

In the meantime, please contact any member of the team (noted below) with questions or your thoughts or write to socialjustice@uuhamilton.ca.

Gail Rappolt, Bill Johnston, Doreen Knol, Ashley Daniels, Pat Dickinson, Joan MacNeil, Roberta Weiss, Linda Sivyer and Jean Jacobs. Julie Bergshoeff is our liaison to the Board for this process.