This summer and fall UUC’s Faith Land Initiative (FLI) cohort team is looking for enthusiastic partners to join us in researching what it would take for UUC to move forward with specific actions to share our space to serve the community.

An expanded FLI team conducted research meetings with other churches to learn how they serve the community with their spaces and conducted meetings with community service organizations to learn about current community needs.

Community Garden at UUC?

A few of the top community needs expressed included food security, isolation/community (especially among older folks) and additional support to low-income families in our neighborhood. Meetings with other churches inspired the team with the ways they are sharing their spaces. One of the ideas that the team thought merited investigating further was developing a community garden.

A motivating example was St. John United Lutheran Church on Phinney Ridge. St. John’s has redeveloped parking spaces as a community garden managed by an oversight committee of four (two community members and two congregants). Fees are charged on a sliding scale depending on need. It’s maintained through monthly work parties and serves as a source of organic food for the community and the Phinney Neighborhood Association hot meal program.

To move forward on the garden idea, Patricia Graesser is looking for a handful of interested folks to come together to:

• Research the steps and resources St. John’s has required to initiate, develop and maintain their community garden
• Evaluate UUC’s property for the best location, given the requirements of a sustainable community garden and land-use restrictions
• Identify steps and resources UUC would need to initiate, develop and maintain a community garden that would support our mission and vision and align with our values

If the idea of a community-serving garden is of interest to you, please email patsygraesser@comcast.net  If enough interested folks respond, the small team will meet at a mutually agreeable time and date to discuss the best path forward.

Other Ideas for Serving the Community

Other ideas the FLI team thought merited moving forward with are:

• Investigating space rental opportunities
• Developing partnerships with others in the neighborhood to address low-income family support needs
• Establishing a cycle for hosting TC3 or TC4 in UUC’s parking lot
• Investigating the possibility of using some of our land to create affordable housing
• Further developing decision-making guidance and a process by which we determine how to share our spaces and with whom, consistent with our mission and values.

Please let the team know via email if any of the preceding examples represent your interests and possible commitments. Please submit your input to any one of the team: Patricia Graesser (patsygraesser@comcast.net), Dave Mentz (davementz@msn.com) or Gayle Childers (gaylechilders@comcast.net).

Key Success Factors

Two key points other congregations shared with the UUC FLI team were: Engagement, energy and ownership within the congregation are critical success factors; most sustained community service is congregant-initiated, led and executed, requiring limited oversight by staff once started.

If you are interested in UUC moving forward with an idea, your energy and resources will be the key to propelling it forward.