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News & Views
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Tag >> fundraising
 Tickets are selling quickly. Buy your tickets soon for ANNE WALKER IN CONCERT at the church on Saturday, September 18. Tickets only$20.00. All proceeds to West Hill United Church. The Curtain Call Café will be selling refreshments. Contact the church office to purchase your tickets. Bring your family, friends and neighbours, reserve a table ot two!
Date: June 14, 2010 | 10:00 am - shotgun start Place: Winchester Golf Club, Whitby, Ontario One of our most fun and successful fundraising events, the annual golf tournament is for everyone! Whether or not you're an experienced golfer, a beginner, or have never golfed before, you belong at this tournament. It is a scramble where the best ball of a foursome is the only one that counts. We'll make sure there are experienced golfers mixed with new golfers so don't worry about yoru style or ability. Come on out and greet your friends and make lots of new ones. For more information, contact the church office. See you on the 14th!
Let's do it! Saturday January 16th, 1-4pm, West Hill United Church Auditorium "As individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds and with a diversity of viewpoints, we come together in community, holding in common a reverence for life that moves us to pursue justice, seek truth, live fully, care deeply, and make a difference in the world." VisionWorks, 2009 That one key sentence from our mission statement, encapsulates what it is that we do at West Hill United Church. This Saturday, January 16th at 1pm, we invite you to join us. This is no ordinary gathering! We are gathering to learn what we need to do now so that we can continue to be the West Hill that we are today, and to grow into the West Hill that we will become tomorrow. At last Sunday's service, we handed out little pamphlets that not only give a sneak peek at the 2010 budget, but also outline very concrete and practical actions that we, as a group of people deeply committed to the values of West Hill United, can take to ensure that our future is strong. That pamphlet is just the start. Please come to the Church on Saturday and join the discussion. Come with your questions. Come with your ideas. Come with an open mind. Come with love, and energy, and see how you might participate in keeping love and light and life alive not just at West Hill, but everywhere. Sincerely, Moira French, on behalf of the Board
West Hill United has launched a gift card fundraiser - just in time for the Holidays. If you would like to support West Hill United and get your gift cards in time for Christmas shopping or giving, this Sunday, November 29th is the best time to do it. Our gift card coordinators, Donna and Nadia, will be standing by at the WHU store in the Church lobby to help you before and after the service. Cards ordered this Sunday will be available for pick up on Sunday, December 6th.
Our First Annual Bazaar needs you! We are hosting this wonderful event on Nov. 21st from 10 am - 1 pm in our church basement. The theme is "Greening Your Christmas" so we are looking for special items that are gently used so that people can buy them and re-gift them. Or find something for themselves. We will be having a green holiday workshop as well as offering our not yet famous preserves and baked goods.
We need:
DONATIONS of your beloved items
CUSTOMERS to buy, buy, buy
EVENT VOLUNTEERS to help set up, coordinate, arrange, serve, sell and clean up
VENDORS to sell your wares
On September 26th so many of you showed your commitment by brainstorming with us about we might ensure our long-term financial sustainability. Here is an opportunity for you to now get involved. If you fit into any of the categories above, please contact our church office as soon as possible to be part of this great day. Or email Trisha at trisha@westhill.net
(This article is also published in the October edition of the Salt Shaker) Winner of the 1964 Caldecott Award for children’s books, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak had a film adaptation released earlier this year that will introduce a whole new generation of children to the fairy tale Sendak weaves. In the book, little Max, angry at having been sent to his room without a dinner, imagines his way into a strange and distant land ruled by wild things. Staring into their yellow eyes, he becomes king of them all, dances and rules them until, finally, he becomes bored. Max, tiring of the wild things, finds the control he needs to manage the complex emotional landscape of a child, a place where all the decisions are made by people bigger than himself. When he returns to his room, he finds his still-warm dinner, a sign of his mother’s love, awaiting him. From time to time, we all feel like Max. What we want and what we can do are two different things; forces beyond our control impose their choices upon us; situations we understand but can do nothing about, threaten to engulf us. Frustration builds and anger erupts. If we aren’t careful, our “wild things” end up running the show. We react with our emotions instead of responding with as objective an appreciation of the situation as is possible. On September 20th, I advised the congregation of the financial situation in which West Hill currently finds itself. Thrown off the long range plan we’d set in 2007 by the departure of many long-term, established donors, our focus, necessarily, turned toward survival. The situation appeared beyond our control and, indeed, threatened to engulf us. Frustration built. Feelings of betrayal have been strong. Anger, periodically, peeped out from the depths. During the service that day and in a subsequent email, I invited the congregation to come together to talk about what we might do about the situation the following Saturday. In the interim period, the wild things had a pretty good time. We conjured up all sorts of measures to cut expenses or create income that, while seemingly drastic, were all potentially acceptable outcomes. The images were graphic and stark. The darkness swirled. The week was long. But Saturday came. That afternoon fifty-six people gathered to offer their energy and put their shoulders to the task of getting some objectivity and creating a plan. We worked under the leadership of Scott Campbell, author of 5D Leadership (check it out in our library!), and mentor to the board through its leadership assessment process, to describe the mess we found ourselves in; clarify what we knew and what we only guessed at or didn’t know at all; identify the key elements that would stabilize and sustain us; and “fish-bone” our way to an incredible list of potential options that we can now explore and engage as we (wild things at bay) choose what it is we want to do. In the process, we realized that two significant things could be identified as essential to stabilizing our financial picture and moving forward with confidence. 1. we need to raise a certain amount of money immediately to stem the use of our reserves and 2. we need to increase our monthly income in order to sustain us into the future. We came to a couple of numbers to use without hard facts in front of us. Review of our finances shows that we were close, but not bang on. The figures as they stand now are: 1. we need to raise $34,000 by April 1. 2. we need to increase our monthly income by $4,300 by April 1. Two groups of people are needed to get this work underway, one looking at immediate fundraising ideas and the other looking at sustainable income sources. A few names were collected at the end of the meeting. Darrick Heyd has agreed to coordinate the fundraising group. Joe Konecny will coordinate the other group. Both groups will be energetically engaged in the process of moving us toward stability so if you’re inclined or forgot to put your name down on Saturday, let someone know! Getting these two groups going and brainstorming some ideas for them to work with were huge tasks we had to accomplish on Saturday and we did. I like to think, though, that the greatest accomplishments made that day came in the form of single steps. As each person took his or her first step toward the church that day, a little bit of “we can do it” that hadn’t existed before popped into the realm of possibility; working through our challenges became a little bit more likely. Without those first steps, it would have been an empty room. In an empty room, “we can do it” never gets said, thought, even dreamt. The wild things continue to stamp their feet. But Saturday afternoon, one step at a time, we stared the wild things down, got them under control, found our way to possibility, to maybe, to something can be done. And, as we all know, once you’ve managed to get that far, the sky’s the limit!
Posted by: Gretta Vosper in worship, thoughts, spirituality, religion, progressive, people, gretta, fundraising, current events, community news, church news on
Sep 24, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m., at the church
West Hill United has, for the last several years, been at the forefront of what we call the “progressive movement” within the church. What we had come to know about Christianity from courses we'd taken, books we’d read, conversations we’d shared, thinking we’d done, and experiences we’d had had moved us to a place where what we did and said in an ordinary Sunday service no longer reflected our understandings. We chose not to do nothing about this; rather, we began a journey toward creating the non-exclusive spiritual community for which we are now known across Canada and around the world. The journey continues to be exhilarating. The relationships we nurture, the lives we touch; the music, songs, prayers, and hope we release into the world; the community we continue to build are all life-giving facets of this engaging work. We’re passionate about it and that passion shows in what we do and in the responses to it, both positive and negative. Already, people across Canada, in the United States and the United Kingdom, in Sri Lanka, Australia, France, Nepal, and Brazil, have contacted us to express their gratitude for what we are doing. Others, for years to come, will share in the benefits of our willingness to risk being on the bleeding edge of change and setting a course that they might follow. We find, however, that as a single, small community of faith, on our own and without significant changes, we can no longer sustain this considerable, and, we feel, essential work of transforming Christianity. As a committed band of hardworking, visionary people, we have borne the burden of this work and paid its costs up front. Our recent donor losses, realized as a result of our work, have placed us in a highly critical financial position; we are very close to reaching the depletion of our resources. This morning, I shared with the congregation the news that, with current revenue trends continuing and with additional expenditure scrimping, we can expect to keep our doors open for a limited number of months. Our surplus funds will support us until the end of May, 2010. At that point, we will begin to use our overdraft, secured by $20,000 in Canada Savings Bonds. Those funds will be depleted at the end of August, 2010 at which time the bonds would need to be cashed in and turned over to the bank which holds them. We could no longer pay staffing, mortgage, or building costs. What does this mean? Clearly, it means that we must make some major changes or find some significant donors who can support us through this difficult part of the journey to the place of strength we know is possible. Clearly, it means we need to examine all our options and determine which are viable, desirable, acceptable. Our meeting on Saturday will be a first step in determining what those options are: what we want to do, what we must do, and what we can do.
If you are at all able, please join us at the church on Saturday the 26th at 1:00 to help strengthen the foundations of this new Christianity we represent. We will endeavor to have childcare available; please let us know if you require it. If you are at a distance and would like to participate, please contact us and we will work toward making that possible. Until then and beyond, please hold the community in your heart and your prayers.
 It was a phenomenal day to hoist a hammer and make a contribution to the Habitat for Humanity build taking place in our community, just south of the church off Manse Avenue. One hundred and eighty women were gathered into house groups and then further divided into work groups as part of Toronto Habitat's first ever Women Build.
The Habitat Women Build brought together women from all sorts of professions and from communities all over the country. For some, it was their first build. It was my third and, like the others I'd been on, a total delight from start to finish. Working under Leslieanna, L.A. for short, we tackled the joists for the second storey floor. Well into the day, however, we discovered that the "elves", a crew of men who come in after the women each day to make sure what needed to get accomplished was completed so that the women arriving the next day could start where they were supposed to start, had made a serious error. Two joists, at one end, had been fixed at 171/2 inches instead of 16. It had thrown the entire length of joists off for the rest of that room.  The hammers turned around and the claws went into action. A couple of hours later, we'd made up the ground lost, but we didn't get to lay the sheeting for the second storey flooring. Our elves will have done that once we left and we were grateful to not have to stick around until the work was completed. Exhausted, we headed home, some to return the next day.
As I said this past Sunday during my reflection, Habitat is one of those global bodies that disturbs the homeostasis we think we have achieved. Over and again, it points to what needs to be done and, despite community opposition, shortages of funding, and tired volunteers, it hangs in there, gets the job done, and new communities are formed. Habitat invited those 180 women, and the 200 that showed up the next day, and the day after that, to be part of changing the world 1, 2, 3 families at a time. It's a great vision and one in which I was honoured to be a part. You can participate, too. West Hill has identified a day in October to head down to the site and help with what I hope will be, by then, finishing touches. Anyone can participate, able-bodied or otherwise -- there's lots to do. The only requirement is that you try to raise $50 for Habitat in sponsorships or by making a personal donation in that amount. It is an amazing experience and one you won't likely forget. Changing the world -- one of the best highs you can imagine!
After over 13 years as the office administrator at the church, Peggy Hall retired at the end of March 2008. When reflecting on Peggy's compassion and sense of justice, her ability to make this faith community a better place because of her presence, and her impact outside of this community, the Board established an annual contribution in her name. This annual contribution – the Peggy Hall Fund – will be funded each year from special targeted givings by the congregation and will honour and celebrate Peggy's ministry in the life of this congregation. Special envelopes will be available for this purpose over the next few weeks. The charity Peggy chose is the World Development & Relief Fund of the United Church Mission and Service Fund. This fund so aptly exemplifies many of the values Peggy shared with the congregation and the wider world.
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