Friday, January 16, 2015

Open Bidding: Join the AUUction Committee!

The AUUction Committee will hold an organizational meeting on Sunday, January 25th after the service in Children’s Chapel. We will discuss many aspects of the auction and assign preliminary roles. The auction is our largest fundraising activity of the year and is a lot of fun to work on. If you are interested in helping, there are many opportunities both large and small for you to participate.

Please email the committee chair, Bill Childers, at wchilder57@gmail.com to be included on the listserv for the committee for this year and/or to RSVP to attend this month’s meeting.

Setting the Stewardship Table

Save the date for the Annual Stewardship Campaign Kickoff: Sunday, February 15th, immediately following our worship service at 11:15 a.m. We'll have brunch, fellowship, activities, and information to share as we prepare for our future together. Stay tuned for more information! 

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Welcome to our New Accompanist

We bid a fond farewell to Gonzalo Farias, who has served as our Interim Accompanist since September, and we plan to welcome Matthew Gladden as our new Accompanist.

Currently a DMA candidate in Vocal Coaching and Accompanying at the U of I, Matthew has served as a pianist/organist for the First United Methodist Church of Urbana, he currently accompanies The Singing Men of WGNN, and he has also been an accompanying assistant at the U of I. In addition, he owns Gladden Music LLC (www.methodbooks.com), which sells instructional books to piano teachers. Prior to moving to Champaign in 2009, Matthew served as a pianist in various churches in Oregon, Colorado, and Washington, and he was the winner of a number of musical awards.

Many thanks to members of the Accompanist Search Committee: Marsha Clinard, Axel Gehrmann, Tanja Hodges, Frank Knowles, and Matt Sheppard.

-- Millie Davis, Chair

Monthly Shared Offering: The Public i

January’s Shared Offering will help support The Public i, the longest-lived alternative paper in Champaign-Urbana (C/U). Affiliated with the Independent Media Center for all of its 12 years, the Public i is a 501(c)(3) non-profit. We are all volunteers to “a collectively-run, community-oriented publication,” and invite anyone from the community who wants to attend editorial committee meetings and contribute a story. Providing a forum “for topics underreported and voices underrepresented,” we are local authors writing about local, national, and international issues, plus people originally from C/U who continue to contribute or let us reprint their stuff (Mark Weisbrot, Robert Naiman, Dave Roediger, Sarah Lazare). Every article promotes social justice by valuing diversity, fighting injustice, and promoting equality. Pieces range from “A Day at Stateville,” performed at UU church last May, and Pete Seeger's 1958 visit to UIUC, to the Northwestern Football Player Union, to Russia, Ukraine, and Hungary, and from local healthcare and local prison and police reform (not building a new jail, returning the MRAP, not employing tasers) to the environment and environmental justice (Mahomet aquifer, Homer Bulldog mine). For these and other stories, visit our website at http://publici.ucimc.org/.

We operate on a shoestring budget. In addition to an online edition, we publish an eight page print edition that works out to 10 issues/year. We distribute our ca. 3000 print run in numerous cubbies located throughout C/U. The poor quality, old-timey newsprint vs the better-looking online version means you have to wash the ink off your hands when you're done reading.

Money from UUCUC Shared Offering will go entirely towards publication costs, approximately $300/issue. The Public i does not run ads and all labor (editing, distributing) is volunteer-donated.