Month: May 2022

Sing with the Music Director Finalists!

May 31, 2022 /

Learn more about our two Music Director Finalists (biographies below), and sign up to meet and sing with them!

Meet and Sing with Benjamin Hanson:

Benjamin Hanson will lead a choir rehearsal at 4 PM on Sunday, June 5th. CLICK HERE to register. 

Benjamin will also lead music during in-person Flower Communion on Sunday, June 5th.

We will have a Zoom meet & greet with Benjamin on Friday, June 10th at 12:30 PM. CLICK HERE to join on Zoom.

Meet and Sing with Emily Jaworski Koriath:

Emily Jaworski Koriath will lead a choir rehearsal at 4 PM on Sunday, June 12th. CLICK HERE to register.

Emily will also lead music during our in-person service on Sunday, June 12th.

We will have a Zoom meet & greet with Emily on Monday, June 13th at 12:30 PM. CLICK HERE to join on Zoom.

We hope you will join us in singing with and getting to know the candidates and be part of this giant step forward for our Music Ministry and whole church. Learn more about the candidates ⬇️

Benjamin Hanson is a conductor and baritone with a background in church music leadership and vocal pedagogy. He holds a master’s degree in Choral Music from the University of Illinois, where he studied conducting with Andrew Megill and Ollie Watts Davis. During his studies he conducted many of the University’s curricular ensembles, including the UIUC Black Chorus, Chamber Singers, and University Chorus, and also directed the choirs at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign. Before moving to Illinois, Benjamin served for several years as the Music Director at All Saints-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara, CA.

A native of Wisconsin, Benjamin completed his undergraduate degree in Vocal Performance from the Conservatory of Music at Lawrence University, where he studied voice and vocal pedagogy. Benjamin enjoys performing as a concert soloist, including as the primary soloist in the recent North American premier of Johann Hummel’s Exodus oratorio, “Der Durchzug durchs Rote Meer.” In 2019 he was the Vocal Fellow and featured soloist for the N.E.O. Voice Festival in Los Angeles, CA, where he premiered over a dozen new works for choir and solo voice. For the past two years Benjamin has performed as a Young Artist Fellow at the Illinois Bach Academy, where he has sung as a soloist in several Baroque oratorios.

Benjamin currently lives in central Illinois with his partner and two cats, and is very excited to see where he is called to next.

Emily Jaworski Koriath (DMA, RYT-200) is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she focuses on undergraduate voice lessons. In her private practice, she works with singers on healing emotional trauma to facilitate more authentic artistry. Emily combines voice science, body awareness, and spiritual connection to help singers reclaim their joy and freedom in singing. 
 
Emily enjoys a thriving performing career and appears most often in recital with her husband, pianist Tad Koriath. The duo’s debut recital recording, These Distances Between Us, will be released by NAXOS Classical in June of 2022. 
 
Through her work as a Unitarian Universalist music minister, she has completed training in Systems Theory, Ethics, Multicultural Competency, and Examining White Supremacy Culture. She participated in “Undoing Racism for Community Organizers” presented by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond in New Orleans. Emily has enjoyed fruitful musical relationships with the UU Church of Concord (NH), Arlington Street Church (Boston, MA), Starr King UU Fellowship (NH) and Boulder Valley UU Fellowship. She served as the General Assembly music coordinator in 2018. 
 
During her doctoral coursework at Boston University, she worked closely with choral conductor and human rights activist Andre de Quadros, studying his method of Empowering Song for choral organizations and disenfranchised populations, teaching music to incarcerated youth in Massachusetts, and touring with the social justice choir Voices 21C. At BU, she studied with Dr. Lynn Eustis, author of The Singer’s Ego, The Teacher’s Ego, and The Singer’s Epiphany

May 27, 2022 /

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”51900″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]No in-person service this weekend. Join us online!

As many of you know, we have seen a rise in COVID cases, once again, and unfortunately a few of our internal staff and supports for this week’s service have tested positive in the past few days. We do not know of any exposures at Foothills events. However, out of an abundance of precaution, and due to staffing shortages, we will be moving all online for this week’s service.

Join special guest Rev. Kelly Dignan this Sunday, May 29, for Embodied Practices for Resilience. Kelly is a spiritual guide and ordained UU minister who sits on the Board of Directors and contributes to the curriculum of Wellspring, a program for spiritual deepening.
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We will gather at 9 AM on Zoom. You can also watch a broadcast of the service at 11 AM.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Announcing Music Director Finalist Visits!

May 19, 2022 /

We are thrilled to share that the Music Search Team has unanimously selected two finalists for the Music Director position. One finalist will visit the church June 4-6, including attending Sunday service on June 5. The other finalist will visit the church June 11-12, including attending Sunday service on June 12. We will share details about opportunities to meet the candidates (including opportunities to sing under their choral direction) soon!

In partnership,

Rev. Gretchen Haley and Kelsey DiAstra

P.S. If you are interested in sharing your musical talents with our Foothills community, please email Jennifer Jolly at jenniferj@foothillsuu.org.

The Building Bulletin: May 2022

May 11, 2022 /

Groundbreaking Ceremony on May 17th.

The church has been investigating an expansion in some form since 2008. This latest effort has been ongoing since 2016. Thousands of volunteer hours from previous building teams, board members, fundraisers, group facilitators, and more have gone into this project. We are finally about to see the fruits of our labors: a beautiful new sanctuary that will serve our needs for years to come. Please join us in celebrating this event – you can even take your picture in a hard hat! The groundbreaking celebration will be 5:30 to 6:30 PM on Tuesday, May 17th, with a brief ceremony at 5:45 followed by light refreshments.

We feel we are ready to have our groundbreaking, but that doesn’t mean you’ll see construction equipment on the grounds just yet. We have two preconstruction tasks yet to be completed: moving the gas line that serves the RE building and installing a new electric transformer. The gas line work is handled by Xcel Energy and the electric work by the City of Fort Collins. We have submitted a permit application for the gas line work but still don’t have a timeline. We expect you will see this work begin in the next few weeks.

We are still waiting for a building permit, but progress is being made. The architects feel that the building permit is no longer the critical path. A separate permit application has been submitted to the Poudre Valley Fire Authority. We have had several discussions about fire engine access, water availability, and sprinklers during the development process and don’t expect problems with this application.

Pinkard Construction Co., our contractor, has hired subcontractors, begun to order materials, and is working on scheduling and logistics. Every effort is being made to avoid disrupting church functions. The lower parking lot will be used for construction staging. It will be fenced off and secure.  Once our part of construction begins, we’ll set up regular tours for you to see what’s happening and watch the progress.

It is so exciting to have the start of the project in view. Thank- you to all the volunteers, donors, and cheerleaders who have helped along the way.  

In partnership and with excitement,

The Building Expansion Team

Chris Bettlach, Jerry Hanley, Peg MacMorris, and Margaret Cottam

Sign up for the building expansion newsletter!

Roe v. Wade: What we can do

May 4, 2022 /
I want to get involved!

Dear ones,

We were both born after Roe, and we both realized today that one of our first real pathways to understand what abortion meant, especially what life was like before legal abortions, was the movie Dirty Dancing. In both our families, the movie was scandalous – both because of the sex scenes and because it portrayed a woman having an illegal abortion. 

What wasn’t included in the conversation around the ‘scandalous’ parts of the movie was the risk the woman faced to have the abortion or how common that risk was for women for a long time. Because before Roe, it wasn’t that abortions didn’t happen. They just resulted in more women dying.

The arrival of Roe marked the end of that risk, at least on one level. But legal abortions don’t mean much if there aren’t any providers in your state or if they are outside what you can afford. Over the last 40+ years, legislators in many states have used various restrictions as a strategic move to make abortion inaccessible even if they couldn’t make abortion officially illegal.  

The chipping away of abortion access over the last decades doesn’t mean that the leak about overturning Roe did not come as a blow yesterday. This decision will have major life-changing and life-ending consequences, especially for BIPOC communities and people with lower incomes. It’s incredibly painful for many, especially those who fought long and hard to see abortions made legal. For providers working in states where abortion will soon be illegal, this is devastating news for they know all too well how many people they will soon not be able to help.

However you are feeling, take a moment to acknowledge those emotions. Light a candle for all the activists and caregivers and providers who have fought for the right to choose. Make space for the grief of those now at even greater risk from this decision. Know your faith community is with you, lighting candles, making space.  

And then, in the coming days, find a place in the larger response. It may start by grounding yourself in the values and vision that we are called to serve. The emerging organizing collective SACReD has put together this rich resource to help in this enlarging and grounding work. 

We also encourage you to educate yourself – if you are not already aware – about the work for reproductive justice that has been ongoing even after Roe. Two incredible resources are Faith Choices Ohio and Abortions Welcome.  

We are also imagining a few story-sharing circles in the coming weeks and months where we can have a chance to share our stories around abortion and to hear and witness each other in these often complex realities. Abortion can often be an isolating experience, and these days, we need community more than ever. More information to come about this soon.

Beyond this internal and personal work, get to know and send money to support local organizations on the front lines. There are many strategies, including legislative advocacy, organizing to get people from states without abortion access to states with access, creating access to emergency contraception, and providing support for self-induced abortions. 

The organizations we are currently following include: 

To begin, just start perusing their websites rather than reaching out directly. We don’t want to take them away from their work by having to attend to an influx of calls and emails! If you are interested in learning more about any of these organizations, we’d love to have your help collecting information on behalf of our whole community. Please hit reply or email Rev. Gretchen at gretchen@foothillsuu.org if you are interested in this work. 

We also want to acknowledge that the most effective tool in this conversation is comprehensive sex education – a value and resource Foothills continues to provide through our K-1, 6th Grade, and 8th Grade OWL programs every year. Your support of our mission and ministry make this comprehensive, values-driven programming possible for over 60 children and youth (both from Foothills and the wider community) every year.  

As a next step, we are also listening for additional organizing emerging in Northern Colorado, especially among faith communities. If you are aware of organizing happening, please let us know. Please let us know if you would like to be a part of this work.

The path from the beginning to the end of Roe took many, many individuals and organizations nearly fifty years. The path to equal abortion access for all may take just as long. Before you get discouraged, let us also remember that this moment happened in no small part because of faith communities and in small conversations that spoke both to the personal issues and the collective need for legislative and political action.  

We have more power than we realize, and more partners are already working on these things, just waiting for us to wake up and join the movement. We must never forget that in our seemingly simple acts of making space and learning together, educating our children, and following the leads of our partners, showing up as a church can be life-saving work. 

We are grateful to be your partners in this work. Please reach out if you need a little extra support in these days or if you’re looking for a way in.  

With love and gratitude,

Rev. Gretchen and Rev. Elaine 

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