December 2018 Update from Rev. Jen Crow:

For several years now, we’ve experienced the needs for a more inclusive and welcoming building:

• The space is hard to navigate if you have any temporary or permanent mobility challenges, hearing is difficult in the sanctuary and other spaces with and without hearing loss, the space is not intuitive, the balcony and arches room are not accessible
• We’ve experienced the drag of the mortgage on our operating budget
• We’ve needed more space for religious education – we have one of the largest RE programs in the country, with over 550 children and youth registered

In response to these needs, we launched our capital campaign, Not for Ourselves Alone, Building an Inclusive Future, in the fall of 2016, and many of you were among the first contributors. In the fall of 2017, we closed our capital campaign with over $5.5 million in promised gifts, and several of you have paid your gifts off in full already. Thank you!

Dream #1
Since that time, we’ve been working with our architects from Miller Dunwiddie to further clarify and prioritize our needs and determine what we can afford to do within the scope of our budget. We learned that it is possible to build a third floor on the RE wing. This opened up a sense of possibility and spaciousness for our needs now and into the future. This third floor would allow the elevator to extend up, making the balcony and the arches room accessible and creating a bridge from the sanctuary building to the RE wing on two levels. We shared this possibility with the congregation in the winter of 2018 and were met with great excitement and enthusiasm.

Dream #2
As we moved further through the budgeting process in the spring and summer of 2018, it became clear that financially, that third floor was out of reach. Soon after we learned this, I met with one donor to the capital campaign and explained the situation. They asked me a question that has been shaping our response ever since. “What do you lose if you lose the third floor?,” they asked. The answer was immediately clear to me – we lose imagination, we lose possibility, we lose the space to dream.

Meanwhile, throughout this time, we’d been in conversation with Shir Tikvah about the possibility of co-locating. We discovered a lot of alignment in shared values and in our commitment to racial and social justice and pushing back against white supremacy culture. We started to imagine what shared justice work might look like together. We were both excited about reducing our environmental footprint by sharing space, and reducing our operating expenses by sharing the cost of maintaining a building. But we hit an impasse when we discovered that it is critical to Shir Tikvah’s worship culture that they be able to worship in the round with flexible seating, and that our sanctuary space with its angled floor makes nearly impossible. We thought that was the end of our conversation.

Dream #3
One afternoon, when the clergy from both congregations met for lunch, I shared with the group that it did not look like we’d have the money to build the third floor, even after we’d explored the possibility of just building the shell, with the intention to raise more money and finish it later. I shared the drawings of what an open third floor could have looked like – and the rabbis lit up. They went and grabbed the word cloud they had built out of several congregational meetings, when the folks at Shir Tikvah had shared what they hoped for in a worship space. Their dreams nearly identically met our imagined reality, and our conversation about co-locating began again.

So, where are we now? This fall, Shir Tikvah’s Board voted to lean in to the conversation with First Universalist about co-locating, with the intention of solving any problems that may come up in our conversations. First Universalist’s Board voted on a similar resolution, instructing the ministers to pause in our building planning and renovation to fully explore the possibility of co-locating with Shir Tikvah, and they asked us to do that as quickly as possible. Right now, we are working through two key questions:

• With the addition of a third floor, would there be enough space to house all of our offices, classrooms, worship spaces, and large group meeting spaces within the building at 3400 Dupont? Our current exploration says yes to this question.
• What are the legal and financial options for us if we are sharing the use of the building, and are any of these options acceptable to us? A group from our church: Tom McLeod, Nancy Gaschott, Keven Ambrus, Dick Niemiec and Cindy Marsh are working on this question with a group from Shir Tikvah now.

We expect that we will answer both of these questions with a “Yes” in the next few months, which will then lead us into a series of more detailed questions and possibilities. We expect that we will have an important update to share at the February 10th State of the Church meeting, and that we will be holding focus groups for the congregation in the spring so that we will have all of the information we need for a congregational decision about co-location at our June Annual Meeting.

In the meantime – the tuckpointing work to stop the leaks in the sanctuary building has been completed and we have paid off our mortgage. Our focus now is on what a future of sharing space with Shir Tikvah might look like.

Imagine:

• A central accessible entrance and welcome desk, with offices for First U and Shir Tikvah staff on the first floor of the RE wing
• An open, light filled 18 foot ceiling third floor, with elevator access, gender neutral restrooms, and some smaller classroom/meeting space
• Elevator access to the balcony and arches room, bridges between the two buildings, and renovated classrooms that better meet our needs
• Updated and right-sized meeting rooms/classrooms shared by both congregations
• Shir Tikvah worshipping on the 3rd floor on Friday nights and Saturday mornings, with RE for them on Saturday mornings, and Hebrew school in the classrooms on Wednesday evenings.
• Renovated first floor bathrooms
• Improved financial and environmental stewardship.
• The building fully used, not for ourselves alone.