2020-2021 Faith-to-Action recipients

Posted on by Steve Scott

Nominations of recipients for our Faith-to-Action collections were made by church members and friends. The Social Action Team is pleased to announce that all 20 nominations for 2020-2021 were approved. Collections for the recipients will begin in September 2020. Following is an alphabetical list of the recipients and a brief description of each:

Centro Latino de Salud

Centro Latino de Salud helps immigrants from Spanish speaking countries, and immigrants from other countries as well, navigate life in Columbia and mid-Missouri. The Centro helps people access legal and health services and provides translation if needed. They offer an after-school tutoring program for children kindergarten through 12th grade. They offer English and Spanish classes. They offer health classes, and the Comedor Popular serves healthy foods and provides opportunities for people in the Latinx community to learn about healthy foods and ways to prevent obesity and diseases related to obesity.

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Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture

CCUA does many things that fit with UU principles. They provide fresh, healthy food (by the ton) for families in need in our community; they provide educational opportunities for children in our schools; they provide help to families in need who are learning to supplement their nutrition with fresh home-grown vegetables, with a particular focus on refugee families; they provide educational and volunteer activities for adults. A new program they are starting is the Henry Kirklin scholarship fund for beginning Black farmers.

Our church has supported them for many years, with our support going to the “planting for the pantry” program that provides tons of fresh, healthy vegetables to local food pantries.

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CoMo Crisis Shelter

The Gail Plemmons Memorial Car Camp and Crisis Triage Center serves as a drop-off and distribution point for community resources, a safe place to sleep for those living in their vehicle and a place for anyone seeking aid and comfort to visit.

The Safe Camp is at an undisclosed inner city location. The size of the camp is limited to 10-15 tent sites by its location.

The homeless camps are regularly visited to distribute food and supplies and perform basic health monitoring. If someone tests positive for Covid-19, a doctor will perform tests, and the person is isolated in a hotel.

Bottled water is delivered daily to four locations where the unhoused congregate.

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Festival of Sharing UUCC annual project

The Festival of Sharing project provides a structure for identifying critical needs for people in Missouri and around the world and provides resources to trusted agencies for distribution to those in need. 2021 will be our church’s 14th year collaborating with participants of other faith groups to help provide these resources.

The Rev. Mel West, Retired, inaugurated this project in the 1980s through the newly formed United Methodist Office of Creative Ministry.

The activities culminate with in-gatherings in the fall at several locations around the state. Groups from all over Missouri bring the gifts they have created and collected. Any extra supplies are used for creating more kits and packs.

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First Chance for Children

First Chance for Children provides early childhood programs and family resources to foster healthy outcomes for children and families in mid-Missouri. Our vision is that all children will arrive at school ready to learn and succeed in school and in life.

Programming includes:

  • Safe Cribs provides a safe crib and the information families need to safely put their child to bed and deal with sleep related issues. The crib is delivered to the family home and is followed by five additional home visits.
  • BabyU provides home visitation as staff walk alongside families with children prenatally through the first semester of kindergarten providing resources, education, and support
  • Baby Bags provides diapers, wipes, hygiene items, and other supplies needed to provide care and comfort to children, delivered along with child development and safety information.
  • Lend & Learn is a free, fun place where parents can play with their children ages 0-5, interact with other parents, and ask trained staff questions about development or other concerns. Toys are available for check out so families can extend learning and play at home.

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Heart of Missouri CASA

The mission of Heart of Missouri CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) is to train and support volunteers to be exceptional voices for every abused and neglected child in the Boone and Callaway County family courts. We believe that all children have the right to safe, healthy, stable homes, free from abuse and neglect. Volunteers complete an intensive screening process, including an interview, three reference checks, and a comprehensive background screening.

Following completion of the 30-hour pre-service training, volunteers are sworn-in as officers of the court and are appointed to a case with one or multiple children. CASA volunteers stay with that case until it closes (average of two years), visiting the child(ren) two times per month, attending all the professional team meetings and court hearings, and speaking up for the children’s needs with the Team and Family Court Judge.

Through the volunteers’ fact-gathering efforts, training, and relationship-building, they can adequately assess the child’s needs and advocate for unmet needs to be addressed. CASA volunteers are uniquely poised to make recommendations regarding the placement of the child and the permanency plan due to their objectivity and extensive knowledge of the case/child. Our professional staff members provide ongoing supervision and assistance to ensure volunteers have the needed information, skills, and resources.

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Honduras Education Fund

The Honduras Education Fund is putting our partners in the northern rural Cangrejal Valley, Cito and Keyla, through college. Cito and Keyla have been instrumental in our church’s service trips to this valley. Over the past 10 years, members of our church have traveled to Honduras, and our church community as a whole has funded the building of latrines, supplies for the local health clinic, uniforms for children, and a microfinance organization. The Honduras Education Fund is a separate fund for supporting further development in the Cangrejal Valley by investing in two of its brightest and most committed residents.

While hundreds of thousands are fleeing Honduras to come to the United States, Cito and Keyla are working hard to make the conditions in their valley livable and sustainable for all the residents in their community. One of the best ways we can support them is by helping them have the education, the tools, and the means, to support themselves and their family. By investing in them, we are helping the whole community.

Cito and Keyla are widely known for the consistent and persistent work they do in the valley. During the Covid-19 pandemic, while they have struggled with health issues in their own family (their youngest child has had both dengue fever and H. Pylori within the last 6 months), they have continued to excel at school, and to help other children in the valley continue to learn. Both of them have straight As, and the professors were so impressed with Cito that they gave him a scholarship to travel to England this past year.

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Loaves and Fishes Social Action Team Fund

Loaves and Fishes was started in the mid-1980s by the St. Francis Catholic Worker community and serves a free community meal seven nights a week from 5 to 6 p.m. in the basement at Wilkes Boulevard United Methodist Church in partnership with that church and more than 20 other local faith communities and other organizations.

UUCC provides the evening meal at Loaves and Fishes on the third Sunday of every month. Volunteers in our congregation prepare food for these meals and help set up, serve, and clean up. Our church reimburses food expenses incurred by volunteers as much as possible. Funds received in this Faith To Action collection are placed in a dedicated UUCC account to cover these reimbursements.

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Minority Men’s Network Educational Foundation

The Network seeks to promote educational, economic, social, civic, and legal progress on the part of African Americans of Columbia and Boone County. Historically, the local African American population has been excluded and marginalized in all of the categories listed above, and the Network seeks to change that reality.

Promoting educational attainment among young local African Americans is a major focus of the work of the Network, and financial aid from the UU church will be used exclusively to enhance the Network’s educational fund from which scholarships are given to selected young African Americans annually. The scholarships help to increase the number of African American high school graduates who pursue a quality college education.

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Missouri Faith Voices

Missouri Faith Voices is a multi-faith, multi-racial, statewide, non-partisan organization that is committed to empowering and transforming the lives of ordinary citizens who have been targeted by unfair policies and practices and oppressed by racial and economic injustice. They create the hope, produce the power, and equip those who are impacted with the knowledge and political will needed to create a just society for all Missourians. Missouri Faith Voices has a Columbia chapter with whom we partner frequently.

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Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (MADP)

MADP works to end the death penalty in Missouri by any legal means necessary. It believes that all persons are equal and have worth. Therefore, no one should be killed no matter what that person might have done in the past. Research shows that the death penalty serves no useful purpose. Indeed, it is very likely a detriment to society. MADP offers acceptance, love, and emotional support to all persons, especially those condemned to be killed by the state for unacceptable past behavior.

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Missouri Rural Crisis Center

Since the farm crisis of the 1980s, Missouri Rural Crisis Center has fought to help small family farmers and their communities stop the takeover by corporate agriculture. Some of their top priorities are using local health ordinances to preserve clean air and water in Missouri, and fighting for healthcare for rural families, especially through Medicaid expansion.

Patchwork Family Farms is a project of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center and is a cooperative marketing effort made up of independent Missouri family hog farmers.

UU members preparing meals for Loaves and Fishes may purchase pork directly from Patchwork Farms and have it billed to the UU church.

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No More Deaths

No More Deaths is a ministry to people entering the US along the Arizona/Mexico border. They place food and water in the desert to prevent deaths. They monitor ICE and Border Patrol facilities to document abuses. They provide legal representation, and they lobby for immigration reform. This is an interfaith ministry spearheaded by the Tucson UU Church.

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Race Matters, Friends

Race Matters, Friends is a nonprofit group united in the struggle for racial equity in Columbia, Missouri. We nurture conversations and actions about racial equity, racism, and structural inequality in Columbia, Missouri; the United States; and the world. The RMF Community Bail Fund collaborates with trusted partners to create a fund that will: 1) release defendants who cannot afford bail, providing them with support, information and referrals that can assist them until trial, and 2) advocate for shrinking and eventually eliminating the cash bail system.

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Room at the Inn

Room at the Inn is an interfaith and community effort to provide a warm and safe place to sleep for the homeless in Columbia, Missouri. The shelter rotates between several churches during December-March. UUCC provided shelter for two, two-week periods in the winter of 2019-2020. As of this writing, it is unclear how RATI will function during the current pandemic.

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Russell Chapel Food Pantry

Russell Chapel Food Pantry is open to residents of the City of Columbia every 2nd and 4th Saturday, and provides fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, canned goods, dry goods as well as toiletry items such as toilet paper, paper towels, soap, washing powder, body wash, shampoo, and some OTC medicines. These items are supplied to anyone in need regardless of their circumstances.

The pantry has remained open during the pandemic and has seen the number of families/individuals served increase substantially, serving 109 families/254 people in February 2020, 269 families/536 people in June 2020.

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True North of Columbia

True North provides emergency shelter to women and children escaping from domestic violence, outpatient services, hospital and legal assistance.

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Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC)

UUSC is a nonprofit, nonsectarian organization advancing human rights together with an international community of grassroots partners and advocates.

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UUCC Honduras Ministry

A group from UUCC went on our church’s fifth service trip to Honduras in December 2019 and January 2020. Each time we go, we build latrines because the community so far has always decided that, for public health and environmental reasons, latrines are their greatest need. In addition, each time we assist in other ways depending on the community’s needs and what we can offer depending on the expertise/resources members of our group have to offer.

Over the years, we have helped finance several projects, and ever since the Honduran health department fell apart several years ago, we started sending $400 monthly for supplies for the local health clinic.

We understand that the long history of U.S. imperialism in Central America, and particularly in Honduras, is largely responsible for the deep poverty the people of Honduras live in. More modern U.S. interference is largely responsible for the incredibly corrupt and criminal current government of Honduras. Lending a helping hand by providing financial help and building bridges of friendship between our communities is a small way we can make some reparations.

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Worley Street Roundtable (WSR)

WSR collaborates in partnerships and networks with Columbia Public Schools, higher education, churches, nonprofits and private businesses to support and advocate for disadvantaged students and families of color so that they succeed academically, socially and spiritually within the Columbia Public Schools and in society. WSR also established the “Grow Your Own” teachers program by having internships and mentors leading to four-year scholarships.

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