January Faith in Action Social Action Shared Offering: Faithify: UU Church of the Philippines (UUCP)
Faith in Action’s purpose in this month’s Social Action Shared Offering is to introduce our UU Canton members to Faithify, the UU crowdfunding platform that helps all UUs live out the UUA mission of advancing UU values in the world, equipping congregations for vital ministry, and supporting religious leaders. Through Faithify, more than 300 proposers and thousands of individual donors have come together to build a more vibrant Unitarian Universalism since 2014.
Let’s get started! Log on to the Faithify crowdfunding platform at www.faithify.org. There you can peruse current appeals. In the list check out one that drew our attention as a project worthy of our combined SASO support to Faithify’s effort:
The UU Church of the Philippines (UUCP) seeks funding to make their individual church buildings more resilient and able to serve as Community Centers and Shelters in a disaster. The Philippines averages 20 typhoons a year. The devastation of Typhoon Rai in 2021 proved the need to make more shelters available. Typhoon Rai brought huge damages to homes and businesses. Because many of the UUCP church buildings were not strong enough, they sustained damages also, leaving them unable to open their spaces for others who needed shelter from the storm.
The Unitarian Universalist Church of the Philippines (UUCP) is a resilient faith community comprised of 25 individual churches. UUCP seeks to improve its efforts to become a beloved community where all people feel safe, loved, cared, and respected. They would like to offer their churches as community centers and shelters to community members in times of disasters and other emergency situations.
To do this, they need to make their small church buildings more storm resilient in the face of climate change. Many of their churches in remote villages need structural improvements such as strengthening roof structures, connecting to electricity and water supply, and other emergency supplies and equipment. UUCP seeks to make their buildings strong enough to withstand the bad weather conditions so they can offer temporary shelter to families and individuals who have no place to stay while rebuilding their houses. Their goal is to raise $15,000. Each congregation would need about $2,000.00 to cover the repairs and improvements. They will prioritize very remote congregations where access to government support is difficult.
On Sunday, January 8, our Faith in Action group will receive a Shared Offering to support the work of our siblings at UUCP to help them make their buildings more resilient and welcoming in the face of climate change. As always, you can also send in your donation for this SASO to the church office before January 15, memo-ing the check with SASO-Fathify or donate online through our website. We will forward our combined gifts to Faithify to support this UUCP project. We also encourage our members to make a practice of checking out Faithify regularly to look for projects underway by other UU congregations and members that are worthy of your support .