In July 2025, our congregation continued its strong focus on climate justice by tackling a special initiative called the UU Climate Justice Revival. Over the course of three Sundays in July, UUFR rose to the occasion to imagine a purposeful and just future through conversations, worship, and advocacy. Completing this event marks a significant milestone in our commitment to environmental justice, and the Environmental Ministry Team is proud to memorialize the event and all we accomplished together.
In the sections below, links to summaries, framework and action documents list a LOT of new activities that could be tackled by UUFR members and friends. From advocacy, personal actions, political involvement, community actions and on and on there is something that would fit what you like to do. Join us at an EJMT meeting! We’d love to see what we can work on together.
We had eighty eight UUFR members participate in at least one of three separate sessions. Each session started with sharing planet-friendly meals in our sanctuary. We worked as groups and in pairs to confront current challenging realities and make commitments for action.
First Session: Faithful Grounding & Intentions. During this session, Sam Weaver helped us collectively imagine a thriving community and created a shared vision to guide our future actions. We drew individual and collective “Rich Pictures” to describe, without words, the world we want in 2050.
There was only one rule: no words. These provided the inspiration for the next sessions where we dealt with current reality and proposed actions to achieve climate justice. Climate Revival Rich Picture examples.
Second Session: Making the Connections on the Challenging Realities. This session focused first on collaboratively mapping the challenging realities in our community and their relationships. Links to Comprehensive Summary and Solutions Framework.
Jacques Roeth further helped us in the second mapping to propose community actions to address the realities in the first exercise.
Community caring maps examined the interrelationships among systems, culture, and laws to understand the complex causes of climate injustice.
Third Session: Charting the Course with Transformative Action. Rev. Lisa Garcia-Sampson gave a powerful sermon at the worship service on the last day and joined us to identify actions for climate justice. Russ Outcalt helped us clarify individual priorities, skills, and commitments to joyfully and faithfully transform our communities. A summary of this can be found in the Actions, Thoughts and Reflections.
A final takeaway was the creation of a word cloud, unique to UUFR, which visually represents the most frequent words and themes from our discussions. This commemorates the ideas and insights we shared.
We had fun too! Sam Weaver led us in an “embodied practice” that wound up a little like dancing.
This achievement would not have been possible without the collective effort of every member of our congregation. Your participation, support, and passion for climate justice truly made a difference. We are inspired by your commitment and thank you for bringing the program to life.
A special thank you goes to the Climate Revival team for their exceptional leadership and countless hours of hard work. Their guidance and enthusiasm were the driving force behind this event’s success.
For more information on the program, visit the UU Climate Justice Revival website.
Note: The images on this page were donated by EJMT volunteers and are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
