Kim Wade, 2025-2026 President

Dear UU folks,

“How do you not die from anger?”

Emily Raboteau, author of Letters for Survival asked this question of Yup’ik elder Denis Sheldon whose coastal village of Alakunuk in Alaska is losing ancestral land, homes, and traditional hunting grounds to melting permafrost. “Well, that’s easy,” he answered. “We take care of one another.”

We take care of one another.

These are not solely words of comfort. These are fighting words. As we bear witness to the radical ways in which neighbors are “taking care of one another” in Minneapolis, we are getting a master class in the critical need for, as well as the fierce power of, communal care. Folks across Minneapolis right now are organizing to warn, feed, protect, comfort, embolden, and aid their neighbors. We are witnessing the ways in which “taking care of one another” is not just one plausible response to violence and threat; it is the response.

The work of care-giving and care-receiving is critical work because it is through-work. Collective care is how we get through. Whether in response to the state-sanctioned climate crimes of the fossil fuel industry bearing down upon a small Alaskan village or the state-sanctioned murder of Renee Good in Minnesota, networks of mutual care are enabling us to mourn, adapt, regenerate, and re-imagine from one moment to the next. From one community to the next.

Before our Board of Trustees met last month, the anger, grief, and fear I felt at the accumulating physical and policy violence being perpetrated by our government officials had me questioning whether things like Board meetings matter.

And then, one of the things we did at that January meeting was to sign the Research Covenant we’d created with Rev. Jordinn Nelson Long. Jordinn is working with us this winter to map and to make visible the impacts of thriving progressive faith communities like ours. Our congregation’s Covenant with Jordinn begins:

“We value, above all, our congregants’ relationships with one another. Tending to the care and quality of our relationships with one another both grounds and takes priority above all else that we do.”

In other words, we take care of one another.

That night I recognized, once again, that the Board’s work, that our congregation’s work, is communal care. And communal care is through-work.

We at UUCC are deepening into this work. We are both doing and naming this work with language at once fresh and familiar: collective care, mutual aid, radical neighboring. Words of comfort. Fierce fighting words that re-root and re-imagine how we do church. People have been surviving and tending to one another through communal care, and the re-imagining of communal care, since our very Beginnings. And we are just getting started.

Rev. Dr. Molly Housh Gordon

This month’s worship theme is: Survival is not a factory. It is a poem.

I am delighted to share that our visiting research minister Rev. Jordinn Nelson Long is back among us for the next two months! Jordinn and I have been dialoguing for years about the role of progressive faith communities (like UUCC) as a site of alternate economy, counter-cultural mutuality, and community-building that is also, at a fractal scale, world-building. Over the years I have shared with her some of the many ways that our community has been leaning into these questions and ideas, including our growing understanding of radical neighboring and mutual aid, as articulated by UUCC president Kim Wade. In turn, Jordinn has shared academic grounding with me as her PhD work unfolds. I am so excited for this collaboration between Jordinn and our community as we work together to map our thriving in a way that we hope will deepen both our work and that of the larger Unitarian Universalist movement.

Jordinn’s first offering to us is a workshop on Community Economies, as an introduction to some of the things we’ll be thinking about together over these next months. Please join us in the Sanctuary on Sunday, Feb. 1 from 1 to 3 p.m. after our monthly potluck lunch to start our learning and thinking together! And please also mark your calendar for a linked Worship Service and second workshop on Sunday, Feb. 8.

Jordinn writes: You know that mutual aid is thriving, resistance, a garden where we meet together to dream and grow. Mutual aid is also a network, an exchange, and an economic system where we center care as a fundamental value. My research with UUCC grows from wondering how UU congregations build deep community by moving money, food, things, and services to those who need them. This workshop is a first introduction to what economic geography has to offer us as a radically welcoming progressive community of faith and care. We are looting the ivory tower for its tools (with, I will tell you, the enthusiastic cooperation of at least a few of the academy’s members). We are telling the story of how and why what we do matters, using geography tools to show how progressive church partners to build the world we dream about.

Intern Minister Monica Clark-Robinson

See separate article – Monica shares her Minneapolis experience and provides resources for resistance.

Jamila Batchelder, Director of Religious Education

Have you ever had the experience after a long, hard day, of overhearing your child singing a song to themselves in the next room? Or found a drawing of theirs in amongst school papers that took your breath away? That made that hard day survivable?

This month we are thinking about how creativity helps us survive hard times. Sometimes it is that creativity helps us come up with imaginative solutions to the problems at hand. But also creativity helps us to survive just because. Because it shows us the beauty that we are surviving for. Because its poignancy lets us process our grief. Or simply because it makes us happy and our most human.

Our children, in their boundless creativity, are our great teachers in this. So see if you can find some time this month in making art, singing songs, telling stories, making up games of imagination. Let them teach us how to survive hard times.