The current UTO board has focused on a seven-fold mandate that centers around promoting a culture of thankfulness, raising awareness of UTOs existence, inviting gifts through the ingathering and then recommending disbursement of those gifts to grant applicants. The key priority areas for the board in the past triennium were not only the Annual Ingathering and the work of cultivating a culture of thankfulness, but also creating a member/donor database—something that UTO has not previously maintained.
UTO recently expanded their grant work, awarding fourteen grants to young adults and twelve to seminarians in 2016 and 2017. They also award a total of 77 traditional mission based grants in the first two years of the triennium (2018 numbers are not yet available).
Another new part of UTOs work is the Julia Chester Emery internship. The first iteration was based at General Theological Seminary. The second was based in the Diocese of North Dakota and wound up being a part of the Standing Rock protests at the water protector camp. The third year, the focus shifted on young women who wish to serve the church as lay leaders, rather than as ordained ministers. They have partnered with Missional Voices and the Diocese of Texas to work on relief needs from Hurricane Harvey.
One of the biggest shifts in the previous triennium is the "Blue Box app," seeking to bring the tradition of the blue box of gratitude into your smartphone. Not only will the app enable small micro donations but it will also help users keep a gratitude journal of their moments of thankfulness. It will also share stories of the impact UTO grants are having around the church.
Finally, the UTO moved their distribution center to The Episcopal Church in Navajoland, a mutually beneficial change that seeks to the church their reach self-sustainability.
For the triennium ahead, the board wants to focus on raising up a grassroots network of support for the work of UTO, increase the awareness of the annual ingathering (hopefully with the help of the new app), and to create clearer criteria and expectations in the grant-making process so that more ministries can be supported well. They also articulated essential work they are doing to address discrimination and racism through training and board policies.
Reactions to the Report
The UTO has a pretty awesome history. (Full disclosure, the El Corazón Latino Ministry Initiative at my parish was started with a seed grant from UTO, so I know first-hand the impact this money can have on lives—and am also a little biased in favor of their work!)
But back to the history and context.
Julia Chester Emery was a force in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Episcopal Church. She was National Secretary of the Women's Auxiliary of the Lord of Missions for a total of forty years. During that time of leadership, she visited every diocese of our church and even attended the 1908 Lambeth Conference. She visited missionary work going on in the east. Here at home she was one of the driving forces behind the restoration of a diaconate that was open to women (with women deacons called deaconesses in that time.).
Emery founded the UTO as a way to encourage a culture of gratitude, inviting women to put a coin in their small blue box whenever they were grateful for something. Then, once a year the women of the parish would present their boxes at a Sunday service and the offerings would be sent to the Churchwide Office for Mission Work.
In this report it is clear that the people in charge of UTO are working hard to ensure this ministry continues to grow and thrive in the twenty-first century. The creation of the Blue Box app, in particular, is an excellent idea and I hope it will have a profound impact upon the resources UTO has available for grant money. Even more, I hope it will help with the other goal behind UTO—creating a culture of gratitude in the lives of Episcopalians.
Note: You can click here for a list of all Blue Book Reports & Resolutions that have thus far been reviewed.
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