2022 - Recipient
Center for Positive Aging in Lower Merion - December
The recipient of December’s Offering Outreach is the Chester Children’s Chorus (CCC). The CCC is an arts education organization serving 100 at-risk youth from one of the nation’s most distressed cities, Chester, Pennsylvania. Its mission is to provide an intensive, sophisticated, and joyful choral music experience to young people of the City of Chester and to support their academic achievement and personal development.
The CCC operates three programs that complement each other and provide its young members with a rich and rewarding musical, academic, and social experience. These programs include the School Year Music Program, the Summer Learning Program, and the Math Practice Program. The broad purpose of CCC is to build on the children’s strengths to help shift the likely trajectory of their lives from poverty, trauma, and struggle to success, well-being, and resilience through the power of musical community.
CC before and hosted the group for a concert at MLUC. Because of COVID and the cost in time and money of traveling to different venues, all CCC concerts are now held at Swarthmore College. Performances are joyous occasions, with standing room only, so if you plan to attend, get there well ahead of curtain time. Visit the CCC site at https://www.swarthmore.edu/chester-childrens-chorus/concert-schedule.
Center for Positive Aging in Lower Merion (PALM) - November
The recipient of MLUC’s November Offering Outreach contribution is the Center for Positive Aging in Lower Merion (PALM). PALM’s mission is to assist adults 55 years of age and older to maintain a healthy, satisfying quality of life. The center provides services and activities in a nurturing environment that enables seniors to function more independently in the community. PALM is an advocate of unmet needs of older adults and is a repository of information about their rights, benefits, and opportunities. PALM programs support aging gracefully in community. PALM offers many activities in person or virtually, as well as trips to local attractions. Located in Ardmore, the center began offering programs to seniors in 1979. Offering Outreach funds will be used to purchase operating supplies. Visit their website at https://www.palmseniors.org/.
Chenoa Manor - October
The children in the MLUC religious education program chose Chenoa Manor as the recipient of our Offering Outreach for October. Its mission has two parts: animals and youth. Chenoa Manor provides a sanctuary for animals that have been released from factory farms, labs, or places where they were kept as exotic pets. Most animals have been abused, neglected, or relegated to the slaughterhouse.
The organization also offers children an opportunity to heal their broken bonds with nature and the environment. Through hands-on experience in the teaching gardens and through the relationships participants forge with their animal friends, the program aspires to reconnect each child to the planet and inspire them to see it in a new light.
The mission of Chenoa Manor aligns with our UU values and principles. The program strives to instill in young people a sense of compassion and respect toward all living things and an opportunity to develop a relationship of mutual trust, patience and understanding with animal residents. The hope is that these strong, positive connections will carry over to the children’s relationships with other individuals.
Chenoa Manor recently published a beautiful children’s book, A Wabi-Sabi World, which encapsulates many UU values. It is available here: www.chenoamanor.org.
Chester County Opportunities Industrialization Center ESL Training - September
The September recipient of MLUC’s Offering Outreach is the ESL (English as a second language) program of the Chester County Opportunities Industrialization Center (CCOIC). Our contribution will support classes in English for beginners through advanced students. The aim is to help them find jobs and succeed in the community. Reading, writing, speaking, and English comprehension are developed in the context of real-life and workplace situations. Classes are offered at CCOIC’s facilities in several locations.
During the COVID outbreak, classes were delivered on-line. In-person classes return as conditions warrant. During the 2018–2019 program year, CCOIC and its partners served more than 700 adults through classes, training sessions, workshops, and one-on-one consultations.
CCOIC is affiliated with the internationally known Opportunities Industrialization Centers of America (OICA), which was started by the Reverend Dr. Leon Sullivan in 1964 in Philadelphia. For more than six decades, OICA has offered a broad range of support services to economically disadvantaged adults and children. Visit the organization’s website for information about volunteer opportunities (https://ccoic.org/get-involved/).
Interfaith Hospitality Network of the Main Line - July and August
The recipient of MLUC’S Offering Outreach for July and August is the Interfaith Hospitality Network of the Main Line (IHN-ML). IHN-ML provides a caring and positive environment for homeless families while they design and implement a plan to break the cycle of homelessness in their lives. With the involvement of area congregations and the energy of several hundred community volunteers, IHN-ML is dedicated to helping families strive for a better tomorrow. MLUC is one of 12 host congregations that periodically provide homeless families with home-cooked meals and a place to sleep and feel safe.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the families have stayed overnight at IHN-ML’s Day Center in Norristown. Many costly adaptations have been made, and the needs of the organization continue as they work to ensure accommodation for families. Meanwhile, the organization is responding to an unprecedented number of calls from graduates and community members who have lost their jobs and need immediate financial assistance to pay their phone bills, purchase daily necessities, and pay their rent.
Offering Outreach funds will enable IHN-ML to continue their vital work to connect families to community resources and empower them to achieve and maintain affordable housing.
Morris Home - June
June is Pride Month. MLUC’s Offering Outreach recipient will be Morris Home, a residential treatment center for substance abuse that serves transgendered people.
Morris Home supports trans- and gender-nonconforming individuals as they develop the knowledge, skills, and supports necessary to promote sobriety, manage emotional and behavioral difficulties, choose and maintain safe and healthy lifestyles, and develop healthy relationships with peers, family, and the community. Morris Home, the only residential recovery program in the country to offer comprehensive services specifically for the transgender community, provides a safe, recovery-oriented environment in which people are treated with respect and dignity.
In partnering with Morris Home, MLUC will be living its values by donating resources to a like-minded organization that values action, justice, and community.
Darby Creek Valley Association - May
The Darby Creek Valley Association (DCVA) is the recipient of our May 2022 Offering Outreach. We have a long association with this organization. Many of us live in the Darby Creek watershed. The church is in the watershed; we get our water from it; our treated waste water is returned to it downstream. We enjoy its parks and paths throughout the year. The watershed ranges from beautiful forests, streams, and parks in its upper reaches to industrial wastelands as it nears its end in the Delaware River. The watershed covers 77 square miles and contains half a million people.
DCVA is dedicated to the preservation and restoration of this important chunk of our planet and our homes. The association’s work is wide ranging. It provides environmental education to schools and organizations. It sponsors cleanup campaigns for pulling bottles and cans and, today, COVID masks from streams and paths. MLUC also supports the association by supplying volunteers to these efforts.
DCVA works with state and local governments to mount larger-scale protective efforts such as laws and ordinances to encourage good environmental-protection practices.
This work includes efforts to clean up past industrial pollution.
Aid to Ukrainian Refugees - April
During the month of April our offering outreach partner is the Unitarian Providence Charity Organization, which is the service organization of the Hungarian Unitarian Church in Transylvania. Their mission is to serve people and communities in need, without ethnic or religious discrimination. Since the group is made up of ministers and unpaid volunteers, they work with almost no overhead costs.
Our friends in Transylvania are doing wonderful work for refugees that are coming to or through Romania. Here are just a few of the services that they have been providing:
Close to one hundred percent of the funds collected go directly to the women and children in need.
Women’s Law Project - March
The recipient of MLUC’S Offering Outreach is the Women’s Law Project of southeastern Pennsylvania. For more than four decades, the Women’s Law Project has been at the forefront of every legal and public policy issue involving women’s reproductive rights and health care. While this work most prominently involves access to safe and lawful abortion, the spectrum of the organization’s work touches every person regardless of gender, income, or location. The impact of reproductive health and justice denial falls most heavily on people of low income.
Our outreach offering will focus on needs here in southeastern Pennsylvania. Specifically, we will support the program that provides free legal assistance to low-income pregnant or parenting clients, including those experiencing workplace discrimination.
MLUC members are active in many aspects of reproductive healthcare and justice. For example, MLUC members provide escorts to the Planned Parenthood clinics in Norristown and West Chester. We also lobby elected officials in Harrisburg and Washington, DC. Our support during Women’s History Month will provide help to women and families in need in our community.
Worthy Now - February
The Offering Outreach for February is Worthy Now, a UU virtual prison ministry that operates under the auspices of the Church of the Larger Fellowship. The Worthy Now Prison Ministry Network includes individuals, groups, and communities of faith called to prison ministry and justice.
The program’s aim is to ensure that all people who are imprisoned know they are inherently worthy of love and justice and have access to religious freedom. The Worthy Now Network is committed to strengthening our UU First Principle. It serves 1,474 members currently experiencing incarceration. Nine hundred are paired with pen pals. During the past holiday season, volunteers sent more than 4,450 holiday messages to members of the network.
For more information about the Worthy Now Network and about becoming a pen pal, click here.
Paws and Affection - January
Paws and Affection (P&A) is an organization nominated by MLUC’s youth group. P&A dogs help children under 21 with disabilities and health conditions, including, but not limited to, mobility disabilities, balance problems, type 1 diabetes, narcolepsy, anxiety, and depression. P&A also provides facility dogs to professionals who work with children in therapeutic, educational, or health-related settings. Recipients must live within a one-hour driving distance of Merion.
P&A empowers the children it serves by giving them independence and confidence. The children are matched with amazing dogs that begin their service career as puppies. The puppies are raised with love and are given reward-based training and a heavy dose of socialization early in their lives. P&A offers assistance and support to the families the dogs are placed with for the life of the dog.
Paws and Affection is located in Narberth. Its website is https://www.pawsandaffection.org.
Philadelphia area Nationalities Service Center (NSC).
The recipient of December’s Offering Outreach is the Chester Children’s Chorus (CCC). The CCC is an arts education organization serving 100 at-risk youth from one of the nation’s most distressed cities, Chester, Pennsylvania. Its mission is to provide an intensive, sophisticated, and joyful choral music experience to young people of the City of Chester and to support their academic achievement and personal development.
The CCC operates three programs that complement each other and provide its young members with a rich and rewarding musical, academic, and social experience. These programs include the School Year Music Program, the Summer Learning Program, and the Math Practice Program. The broad purpose of CCC is to build on the children’s strengths to help shift the likely trajectory of their lives from poverty, trauma, and struggle to success, well-being, and resilience through the power of musical community.
CC before and hosted the group for a concert at MLUC. Because of COVID and the cost in time and money of traveling to different venues, all CCC concerts are now held at Swarthmore College. Performances are joyous occasions, with standing room only, so if you plan to attend, get there well ahead of curtain time. Visit the CCC site at https://www.swarthmore.edu/chester-childrens-chorus/concert-schedule.
Center for Positive Aging in Lower Merion (PALM) - November
The recipient of MLUC’s November Offering Outreach contribution is the Center for Positive Aging in Lower Merion (PALM). PALM’s mission is to assist adults 55 years of age and older to maintain a healthy, satisfying quality of life. The center provides services and activities in a nurturing environment that enables seniors to function more independently in the community. PALM is an advocate of unmet needs of older adults and is a repository of information about their rights, benefits, and opportunities. PALM programs support aging gracefully in community. PALM offers many activities in person or virtually, as well as trips to local attractions. Located in Ardmore, the center began offering programs to seniors in 1979. Offering Outreach funds will be used to purchase operating supplies. Visit their website at https://www.palmseniors.org/.
Chenoa Manor - October
The children in the MLUC religious education program chose Chenoa Manor as the recipient of our Offering Outreach for October. Its mission has two parts: animals and youth. Chenoa Manor provides a sanctuary for animals that have been released from factory farms, labs, or places where they were kept as exotic pets. Most animals have been abused, neglected, or relegated to the slaughterhouse.
The organization also offers children an opportunity to heal their broken bonds with nature and the environment. Through hands-on experience in the teaching gardens and through the relationships participants forge with their animal friends, the program aspires to reconnect each child to the planet and inspire them to see it in a new light.
The mission of Chenoa Manor aligns with our UU values and principles. The program strives to instill in young people a sense of compassion and respect toward all living things and an opportunity to develop a relationship of mutual trust, patience and understanding with animal residents. The hope is that these strong, positive connections will carry over to the children’s relationships with other individuals.
Chenoa Manor recently published a beautiful children’s book, A Wabi-Sabi World, which encapsulates many UU values. It is available here: www.chenoamanor.org.
Chester County Opportunities Industrialization Center ESL Training - September
The September recipient of MLUC’s Offering Outreach is the ESL (English as a second language) program of the Chester County Opportunities Industrialization Center (CCOIC). Our contribution will support classes in English for beginners through advanced students. The aim is to help them find jobs and succeed in the community. Reading, writing, speaking, and English comprehension are developed in the context of real-life and workplace situations. Classes are offered at CCOIC’s facilities in several locations.
During the COVID outbreak, classes were delivered on-line. In-person classes return as conditions warrant. During the 2018–2019 program year, CCOIC and its partners served more than 700 adults through classes, training sessions, workshops, and one-on-one consultations.
CCOIC is affiliated with the internationally known Opportunities Industrialization Centers of America (OICA), which was started by the Reverend Dr. Leon Sullivan in 1964 in Philadelphia. For more than six decades, OICA has offered a broad range of support services to economically disadvantaged adults and children. Visit the organization’s website for information about volunteer opportunities (https://ccoic.org/get-involved/).
Interfaith Hospitality Network of the Main Line - July and August
The recipient of MLUC’S Offering Outreach for July and August is the Interfaith Hospitality Network of the Main Line (IHN-ML). IHN-ML provides a caring and positive environment for homeless families while they design and implement a plan to break the cycle of homelessness in their lives. With the involvement of area congregations and the energy of several hundred community volunteers, IHN-ML is dedicated to helping families strive for a better tomorrow. MLUC is one of 12 host congregations that periodically provide homeless families with home-cooked meals and a place to sleep and feel safe.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the families have stayed overnight at IHN-ML’s Day Center in Norristown. Many costly adaptations have been made, and the needs of the organization continue as they work to ensure accommodation for families. Meanwhile, the organization is responding to an unprecedented number of calls from graduates and community members who have lost their jobs and need immediate financial assistance to pay their phone bills, purchase daily necessities, and pay their rent.
Offering Outreach funds will enable IHN-ML to continue their vital work to connect families to community resources and empower them to achieve and maintain affordable housing.
Morris Home - June
June is Pride Month. MLUC’s Offering Outreach recipient will be Morris Home, a residential treatment center for substance abuse that serves transgendered people.
Morris Home supports trans- and gender-nonconforming individuals as they develop the knowledge, skills, and supports necessary to promote sobriety, manage emotional and behavioral difficulties, choose and maintain safe and healthy lifestyles, and develop healthy relationships with peers, family, and the community. Morris Home, the only residential recovery program in the country to offer comprehensive services specifically for the transgender community, provides a safe, recovery-oriented environment in which people are treated with respect and dignity.
In partnering with Morris Home, MLUC will be living its values by donating resources to a like-minded organization that values action, justice, and community.
Darby Creek Valley Association - May
The Darby Creek Valley Association (DCVA) is the recipient of our May 2022 Offering Outreach. We have a long association with this organization. Many of us live in the Darby Creek watershed. The church is in the watershed; we get our water from it; our treated waste water is returned to it downstream. We enjoy its parks and paths throughout the year. The watershed ranges from beautiful forests, streams, and parks in its upper reaches to industrial wastelands as it nears its end in the Delaware River. The watershed covers 77 square miles and contains half a million people.
DCVA is dedicated to the preservation and restoration of this important chunk of our planet and our homes. The association’s work is wide ranging. It provides environmental education to schools and organizations. It sponsors cleanup campaigns for pulling bottles and cans and, today, COVID masks from streams and paths. MLUC also supports the association by supplying volunteers to these efforts.
DCVA works with state and local governments to mount larger-scale protective efforts such as laws and ordinances to encourage good environmental-protection practices.
This work includes efforts to clean up past industrial pollution.
Aid to Ukrainian Refugees - April
During the month of April our offering outreach partner is the Unitarian Providence Charity Organization, which is the service organization of the Hungarian Unitarian Church in Transylvania. Their mission is to serve people and communities in need, without ethnic or religious discrimination. Since the group is made up of ministers and unpaid volunteers, they work with almost no overhead costs.
Our friends in Transylvania are doing wonderful work for refugees that are coming to or through Romania. Here are just a few of the services that they have been providing:
- Sending shipments of food, water, hygiene kits, medical supplies, and clothing to internally displaced people within Ukraine
- Covering transportation costs from the border to Western Europe
- Serving food to people who arrive by train
- Offering shelter and housing for adult and child refugees at Unitarian schools, churches, and apartments within the community
- Organizing schools for children and support groups for mothers
Close to one hundred percent of the funds collected go directly to the women and children in need.
Women’s Law Project - March
The recipient of MLUC’S Offering Outreach is the Women’s Law Project of southeastern Pennsylvania. For more than four decades, the Women’s Law Project has been at the forefront of every legal and public policy issue involving women’s reproductive rights and health care. While this work most prominently involves access to safe and lawful abortion, the spectrum of the organization’s work touches every person regardless of gender, income, or location. The impact of reproductive health and justice denial falls most heavily on people of low income.
Our outreach offering will focus on needs here in southeastern Pennsylvania. Specifically, we will support the program that provides free legal assistance to low-income pregnant or parenting clients, including those experiencing workplace discrimination.
MLUC members are active in many aspects of reproductive healthcare and justice. For example, MLUC members provide escorts to the Planned Parenthood clinics in Norristown and West Chester. We also lobby elected officials in Harrisburg and Washington, DC. Our support during Women’s History Month will provide help to women and families in need in our community.
Worthy Now - February
The Offering Outreach for February is Worthy Now, a UU virtual prison ministry that operates under the auspices of the Church of the Larger Fellowship. The Worthy Now Prison Ministry Network includes individuals, groups, and communities of faith called to prison ministry and justice.
The program’s aim is to ensure that all people who are imprisoned know they are inherently worthy of love and justice and have access to religious freedom. The Worthy Now Network is committed to strengthening our UU First Principle. It serves 1,474 members currently experiencing incarceration. Nine hundred are paired with pen pals. During the past holiday season, volunteers sent more than 4,450 holiday messages to members of the network.
For more information about the Worthy Now Network and about becoming a pen pal, click here.
Paws and Affection - January
Paws and Affection (P&A) is an organization nominated by MLUC’s youth group. P&A dogs help children under 21 with disabilities and health conditions, including, but not limited to, mobility disabilities, balance problems, type 1 diabetes, narcolepsy, anxiety, and depression. P&A also provides facility dogs to professionals who work with children in therapeutic, educational, or health-related settings. Recipients must live within a one-hour driving distance of Merion.
P&A empowers the children it serves by giving them independence and confidence. The children are matched with amazing dogs that begin their service career as puppies. The puppies are raised with love and are given reward-based training and a heavy dose of socialization early in their lives. P&A offers assistance and support to the families the dogs are placed with for the life of the dog.
Paws and Affection is located in Narberth. Its website is https://www.pawsandaffection.org.
Philadelphia area Nationalities Service Center (NSC).