Thanks to everyone who participated in one of our “Cottage Meetings” this past summer. In all, we held seven meetings, plus some individual interviews, in which over forty people took part in some way. These were held, you may remember, as part of a process that will culminate in our all-congregation workshop on November 6 after the service and pancake breakfast. In this workshop, we’ll take what we learned from the cottage meetings, plus additional input at the workshop, to try to synthesize our congregation’s values and priorities as we move ahead. We are very fortunate to have Rev. Tandi Rogers, our new congregational contact in the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Pacific Western Region, facilitate. She brings lots of talent and enthusiasm, and is known to lead workshops in a way that is inclusive of all ages.
For those of you who’d like to look at what we learned at the cottage meetings, you can find a compilation of all our notes here. You may recall we had three questions:
- What do you value about UUCY?
- Think of a time you had, either alone or in a group, a “peak experience.” What was it like and how did it happen?
- Imagine UUCY in twenty years. What do you hope it will be most known for?
As we compiled the responses, we noticed that they seemed to fall into four value categories: community, spirituality, justice, and learning. So the responses are organized this way, even though there are, obviously, some gray areas and overlap. We felt like these categories just made it a little easier to see trends and patterns among the many individual items. Also, at the end, we calculated the occurrences of each response’s category as a percentage of responses to each question.
We hope to see you at the workshop on Nov. 6! We’ll have some paper copies of this information available at the workshop. Thanks — your “visioning” team: Randy Luvaas, Linda King, Susan Kaphammer, Nancy Born, and Rev. Ken Jones.