Today Pope Francis arrives in the United States, and people of faith have kicked off a Week of Moral Action for Climate Justice to coincide with the Pope's six-day visit. Unitarian Universalists and thousands of other people of faith and conscience are joining the Franciscan Action Network and Moral Action on Climate in witnessing in solidarity with Pope Francis's moral position on climate change. 

On Monday August 31, a 20-foot tall, 3,000-pound totem pole reached the end of its nearly 1,300-mile journey from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Otter Creek Valley in Montana, home of the Northern Cheyenne and site of a proposed coal mine.

The totem pole was hard carved by Master Carver Jewell Praying Wolf James and other members of the Lummi House of Tears Carvers. This, the third such journey in as many years, was designed to raise awareness of the environmental devastation faced by Indigenous peoples as a result of the transport of fossil fuels. It was also designed to foster new relationships and empower resistance—among different Indigenous peoples and also among different people of faith.

If you believe in the power of younger generations to change the world, you’ll be deeply inspired by what transpired in Chicago this August. For four days, twenty-one young adult activists from across North America gathered to gain skills, practices, spiritual grounding, and relationships to equip them for long-haul climate justice work. Their time together was called GROW: Grounded and Resilient Organizer’s Workshop, hosted by the Unitarian Universalist College of Social Justice and funded by you!

When we join our efforts together in new ways, incredible things happen!

Commit2Respond was formed a year ago in recognition of the fact that Unitarian Universalists and like-hearted people of faith and conscience care deeply about our world and are putting faith into action wherever we are—and if we join together in new ways, we can amplify our efforts and our impact.

By Aly Tharp, Benjamin Franklin Craft-Rendon, Elizabeth Mount, and Jason Faulk

Today, we four Unitarian Universalist Young Adults for Climate Justice (UUYACJ) members will begin making our way across the Gulf Coast to St. Augustine, Florida, to stand in solidarity with the Council of the Original Miccosukee Simanolee Nation Aboriginal Peoples and other allies in the Resist 450 Coalition.

From September 5-9 we will join other activists in peacefully demonstrating against St. Augustine's 450th Anniversary Celebration of the arrival of Spanish colonizers, including a historical reenactment of the landing of Spanish colonizer Pedro Menéndez de Aviles.

People of faith and conscience are gearing up for a Week of Moral Action for Climate Justice during Pope Francis’s visit to Washington, DC, September 22-24, and Unitarian Universalists are right in the thick of it, organized by Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice in the National Capital Region!

Commit2Respond's Steering Committee welcomes five new members this summer!

The Steering Committee is made up of representatives of the nine organizations leading Commit2Respond (find out more about the leadership of Commit2Respond, including returning Steering Committee members).

We are excited to welcome the following newest members:

What do #BlackLivesMatter and environmental justice have to do with each other? Everything.

When Katrina—a Category 5 hurricane that's part of the pattern of more frequent and severe weather events predicted by leading climatologists due to global warming—made landfall on August 29, 2005, the impact was beyond devastating. But it was not felt equally by everyone in the storm’s path.

The neighborhoods hit hardest, the people who were unable to evacuate, the horrifyingly inadequate federal response, the media coverage of the survivors, and the rebuilding efforts all point to the fact that all lives did not and do not matter to our government or to the media. Poor people, disproportionately African American people, bore the greatest impacts of the storm.

Today Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice in the National Capital Region (UUSJ) delivered a letter signed by Unitarian Universalist Association President Rev. Peter Morales to Todd Stern, U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change, urging the U.S. Department of State to speak out in support of a strong, compassionate, and binding international climate agreement at the COP21 Paris Climate Conference.

Six leaders from UUSJ traveled to the U.S. Department of State and met with Special Representative Shaun A. Casey of the Office of Religion and Global Affairs, his staff Liora Dana and Christine Li, and Jesse Young, Senior Advisor to Todd Stern, and discussed the letter (below), the Action of Immediate Witness on climate change passed at the UUA General Assembly in June, and the fact that a strong, international climate agreement is a moral imperative.

by Beth Brownfield and Deborah Cruz

The Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship (BUF) of Bellingham, WA, is a relatively small congregation with just over 250 members. Yet we have made a large impact in our local community and our larger denomination with our social justice initiatives, one of which is our Native Americans Connections Committee.

Little did we realize when we started out that the impacts of our work would be felt so far, so wide, or so deeply. We are in awe of what we’ve been privileged to be a significant part of.