2023-24 ANNUAL OPERATING FUND CAMPAIGN

Dear Beloved,

We are honored to assist in the annual pledge effort for our spiritual home, the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco. We are especially impressed with how you, our spiritual friends and companions, worked together to keep our home and programs intact over the past several years. We call upon you to help us again as we ready ourselves to take off on an exciting journey for the coming 2024 fiscal year. 

Recent events have displayed our ability to pull ourselves up to face many challenges. For example, the pandemic that isolated us from one another actually propelled us into new ways of doing things — with new methods of communication — so we are now sending our ideas out to people in the wider world with in-person and virtual media and ways to connect. We still save time by not driving to onsite meetings, cutting down on emissions into the air. The new systems have helped attract new members from faraway places, some of whom actually joined our community! 

We believe even more can be done to improve our visibility and build on the wider ways to connect. This past year, we have taken many positive steps in several other areas.

Facilities:

• Repointed the old exterior stones of the Sanctuary building;

• Repaired the organ to enhance and continue our wonderful music;

• Survived two floods at lowest floor level and the Macondray rooms;

• Facilities staff pitched in despite illnesses, retirements, and other issues to address building needs with strong team work;

• Guided by the Covid Advisory Team of medical & health professionals, we safely re-opened our doors.
  
  

Board of Trustees, Staff, and Individual Committees:

• Completed a strategic planning process with year-to-year objectives set by the Board of Trustees;

• Hired Rev. Laura Shennum, who has already launched a new children’s and youth program, and a New Members group;

• Celebrated a successful Auction and Holiday Faire held in-person for the first time in two years;

• Offered trainings on two important issues: To further racial justice, The 8th Principle, which complements our other UU Principles; also, the SACReD training by the new Women’s Rights’ Group focusing on women’s reproductive rights;

• Launched a Right Relations Team to work on conflict issues within our own community;

• Participated in trainings with UUA Task Force Widening the Circle;

• The Board of Trustees has signed up to join Beloved Conversations sponsored by the Meadville-Lombard Theological School, to further awareness of meaningful racial justice.
  
  

Finally, we hope that this year will improve our identity in the community, not just as a quaint old pile of gray stones on one of the busiest and most well-traversed corners of The City. We want to be recognized by the public as a home base, offering breakthrough progressive ideas on how to make this world a more just and supportive place for all people. We will raise beautiful, colorful new banners at our western corner, proclaiming the name of our Society. Lastly, we must tend to our neglected surrounding flora which badly need attention, to make our home more welcoming and attractive.
Our goal for pledges to support our operating budget is $750,000, a goal we made and even surpassed last year.

This year the goal is the same!  We ask for your generosity to maintain our spiritual home and join in this new quest. You will see with your own eyes what your pledge will make possible.

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Let’s work together to Make This a Banner Year!

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Thank you,

Dolores Perez Heilbron and David Carl Heilbron