It wasn't the largest pledge ever. But it may be the most memorable since Jehan Chu electrified us with his pledge of $2 million! It’s a very generous $45,000 – exactly the amount needed to pay off the construction loan balance, in full and “IN CASH” as my past co-chair of the Mortgage Prevention Campaign, used to say! We will not need a mortgage! And the Board can quit scrambling to figure out alternatives. How We Got Here We had announced in March, as the Operating Budget Drive got underway, that we needed just $47,500 more to be pledged and paid before 2027 to pay off our outstanding construction loan balance without needing a residual loan. When Katy Julich picked up the phone a couple of days ago, she was delighted to receive an offer of a pledge to pay off the full amount still needed, in a check to be mailed this week. Katy, Helene and I checked and rechecked and confirmed that with the donations and pledges that have continued to come in, $47,500 was indeed the amount still needed. But then, Helene realized that the $47,500 figure conservatively assumed that we would not get full payout of that amount till 2027. Since this family was willing to cut the check now, there would be about $2500 in interest saved due to their generosity. So, their check for $45,000 is on its way, and we will have enough to pay the loan in full. But wait, there’s more! As you may recall, due to several larger pledges not being able to be paid until 2027, and to give all of you more time to consider and spread out your donations to the Capital Campaign/Mortgage Prevention Fund, the Board already was planning to extend the construction loan due date an additional 12 months, to August 2027. This was estimated to cost an additional $10,000 or so, of which $5000 or so was slated to be paid out of the Operating Budget, and was included in the Pledge Drive goal for this year. However – due to prudent management by Helene and Katy, but mostly due to additional pledges, large and small, but always critical pledges received over the year, AND because of interest savings because so many of you paid your pledges ahead of the schedule you originally proposed, Helene also has calculated that the Capital Campaign fund will be able to cover 100% of the cost of extending the loan due date to 2027. Our “Closeout Angel Donor” has insisted on remaining anonymous. SO – it could be anyone! And this achievement truly belongs to all of us. SO – our Angel Donor could be any of us! Next time you see another Fellowship Member or friend, wrap them in gratitude and say thanks. Just in case – and just because. And continue to pay your pledges – our Angel Donor’s Gift will fall flat if the rest of us don’t stay the course and finish before 2027! Your Deeper Roots/Wider Wings + Mortgage Prevention Capital Campaign Committee Shari Loe (chair), Helene Ferm, Paul Ferm, Laurent Comes, Steve Parker (and Franklin Heller, Co-Chair Emeritus) Supported by Board Members Candice Donaldson, David Horst and Tim Davis, Reverend Sasha, and of course, Katy!

UU FaithAction NJ coordinates grassroots social justice advocacy with our member congregations and individual UUs and allies across the state of New Jersey. UU FaithAction NJ works to establish a just and compassionate public policy, guided by our Unitarian Universalist values and covenant. The Fellowship has a long history of involvement with UU Faith Action New Jersey. Our former Ministerial Intern Charles Loflin is its Executive Director, Member Tom Moran leads the Criminal Justice Task Force, and Fellowship friend Jami Thall is the co-leader of the Reproductive Health Task Force. On Saturday, Fellowship members Judie Romano and Daniel Cohen joined its Board. Judie Romano has been our long-time liaison to UUFANJ. There is now an opportunity to be our new UUFANJ Liaison! For more information, email justice@muuf.org. This is a great way to become more engaged in issues that affect us.

For the past few months, the RE students have been working hard on a magazine project. They're excited to announce that the magazine, LOVE AT THE CENTER, will launch in September 2026. Details to come. While the students are editing and steering the content, they will be reaching out for help from the Fellowship. Stay tuned for calls for information and requests for help on articles. Please send any questions to Rachel Barry.

I was in the pulpit last Sunday on the topic of "Less Digital, More Belonging". Not everyone can attend every sermon, but I think it is worth offering for your consideration the challenges in my benediction: Loosen up if only for a bit on your use of the apps that demand your attention. Call someone this week whom you normally text or you haven’t seen for a while. Or meet them for tea or coffee. If you are a leader take a short break from digital flatland and organize a time to renew in person your human connections. Make someone’s day. And may someone make your day. They are worth it. You are worth it. May it be so.

Please sign up to help organize and staff the Fellowship table. You can vote by proxy prior to the annual meeting. Click here for the Signup Genius

You are invited to join Reverend Sasha for lunch and an engaging discussion regarding the membership experience. Sunday, May 31st from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm. To attend, please reach out to Barbara Long to RSVP. Kindly respond by May 29th.

There will be 2 presentations on the proposed budget for the 26-27 Fiscal Year. These sessions will include time for questions and answers. The sessions will be held: Sunday, May 24th at 11:30am in Room B Tuesday, May 26th at 7pm on Zoom Zoom Link for Tuesday, May 26th

The Annual Congregational Meeting will be held on June 7th at 11:30am after a light lunch and coffee/tea following the Service that day. (Please note time update.) Please join us as we celebrate the year that’s been and the year that is coming. We’ll even have a pre-meeting slide show with some choice photos of the year’s activities! In addition to updates and a few reports, we’ll hold votes for: the Slate of Candidates for Board and Committee seats, this year’s Endowment Fund allocation, and the Budget for 2026-27. We’ll need a quorum in order to vote, so please be sure to be on time for the quorum count! We’ve set up a file with documents and information for the meeting. This includes bios for the candidates and a copy of the Democratic Rules by which we will run the meeting. See links below. The agenda and the proposed budget and endowment allocation will be posted in the Documentation file as soon as they are approved by the Board. Remember, there will be information sessions on the Annual Budget on May 24th after service and May 26th on Zoom. Questions on the budget will be answered during these Budget Information sessions rather than during the Annual Meeting so we can focus on the votes and other business during the Annual Meeting itself. Be sure to review the budget and come to the information sessions if you have any questions or concerns. Also – as a calendar reminder: the Annual Fellowship Picnic will be held the following Sunday, on June 14th, and will be a side-dish potluck with Board-cooked burgers and dogs. In order to minimize food safety issues, we’d like to make sure the majority of potluck foods are cold foods. Start planning now on what you’d like to bring to share – we’ll have a signup sheet soon so we know what to expect. Looking forward to seeing everyone at the Annual Meeting and the Fellowship Picnic! Bios for Candidate Slate Documentation for 2026 Annual Meeting – will include Agenda, Budget, and Endowment Allocation information once posted

Next Year we will continue to find ways to build community both inward focused and outward focused utilizing our amazing space. And we need your help. On one Sunday a month we will continue to host our Community Sundays. What was originally designed to fill program-less Sundays with a simple meal together has blossomed into something bigger and more wonderful. This year, all Community Sundays will happen (mostly) on the First Sundays of the Month (Dates Below). Each Sunday already has a theme, but we are open to new ideas. We are looking for two different teams each day. One to be our Masters of Ceremonies. This group will lead activities to help us build community. This can be as simple as providing games and encouraging folks to play or organizing an Easter Egg Hunt. The second role needed for Community Sundays is a Host. This group would work with our Green Aprons to serve and exciting meal for us to share. This can be making soup and sandwiches or coordinating a Thanksgiving Leftover Potluck. AND if your idea can fill both roles, like our Middle School Pancake Breakfast, even better! While Community Sundays focus on strengthening our inward community, one Saturday a month is going to feature events that seek to invite the outside community to our space. These are events like our Buy Nothing Exchange, Queer Makers Market, a gender neutral clothing exchange or a community art project. The dates for these Saturdays are below. If you would like some more suggestions for what you could do, please reach out. But for now we are open to all ideas. Each Group should be at least three people (Rule of Threes). You will be given a guiding document to help you plan. This will include things like how to publicize, who to talk to about kitchen use, registration, ect. The idea is to harness the amazing creativity of our members while not reinventing the wheel each time. If you are interested in being a Sunday MC, Sunday Host, or Saturday Organizer, grab two friends and sign up here. He is also happy to answer any questions you might have. Community Sundays September 13, 2026 - Ingathering October 4, 2026- Game Day November 1, 2026 - Halloween November 29, 2026 - Friendsgiving December 20, 2026 - Solstice January 10, 2027 - Spelling Bee February 7, 2027 - Pancake Breakfast March 7, 2027 -Talent Show March 28, 2027 - Easter May 2, 2027 - May Day Saturday Outreach September 19, 2026 October 17, 2026 November 21, 2026 December 12, 2026 - Queer Makers Market January 16, 2027 February 20, 2027 March 20, 2027 April 17, 2027 - Queer Makers Market May 15, 2027 June 12, 2027

Please join us on May 24 for our lay-led service, "Zora and The Last Slave Ship: Salvaging Treasure from History," to help lift up some history we almost lost! Once again, we will be blessed with the voice and dramatic presence of Keara Hailey Gordon, accompanied by pianist Dan Kader, with Caroline Blanchard interpreting the story for all ages. In 1931, author and anthropologist and American genius Zora Neale Hurston put the finishing editorial touches on what eventually came to be published as Barracoon. But she could not find a publisher in her lifetime for this story of Cudjo Lewis – born in Africa as Oluale Kossola. The manuscript languished in the archives of Howard University until it was finally published in 2018. In 2018, author Ben Raines, relying in part on Barracoon, located the sunken timbers of the last slave ship to bring people from Africa to be enslaved in the United States – in 1859, 51 years after importing slaves was outlawed in 1808. The story of the ship and the 116 souls on board who were kidnapped and brought to the US on a bet and enslaved until 1865 was long dismissed as a myth, even though those people had formed a community known as Africatown in 1865, and of course had many descendants. Cudjo Lewis was not the only survivor from the ship who was still living when Zora conducted her interviews in 1927. Ben Raines not only found the ship, but tracked down descendants of the men who outfitted and piloted the ship and purchased and brought the kidnapped people to Alabama, but also brought a descendant of the Dahomeyans who conducted the raid on Cudjo’s village to conduct a ritual of remembrance and a prayer for forgiveness above the waters where the timbers of the ship were found. His book recording all of this was published in 2019. His certainty that he would find it was founded no little part on Zora’s presentation of Cudjo’s vivid recollections. This service distills over a year of research and reading. Hoping you may want to learn more about the history, or delve into Hurston’s fiction, essays and scholarship, here is a bibliography of some of my reading, which you may borrow for your own. I have not yet read all her works but the list is in several of these volumes, if you want to get into it. Abramowitz, Sophie. “Trained and Taught this Song by Zora Hurston”: Dramatic Ethnography and Zora Neale Hurston’s The Great Day. American Quarterly volume 72.4 March 2020- December 2020. Johns Hopkins University Press. Pages 881 - 908 (Copy available to borrow from Shari Loe) Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston, A Literary Biography. Foreword by Alice Walker. Univeristy of Illinois Press. (1977; 1978). Hurston, Zora Neale. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” Plant, Debora G. Editor. Forward by Alice Walker. Harpercollins Amistad Press. Copyright 2018, Zora Neale Hurston Trust. (New York 2018). Hurston, Zora Neale. The Complete Stories. Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Seiglinde Lemke. Harpercollins (New York: 1995). Individual copyrights for stories included. Hurston, Zora Neale. Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States. Kaplan, Carla, Ed. Copyright 2001 by the Zora Neale Hurston Trust. Harpercollins (New York 2001). Hurston, Zora Neale. Stories from the Harlem Renaissance: Hitting A Straight Lick With A Crooked Stick. Harpercollins (New York: 2020). Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. (Copyright 1938 by Hurston). Harpercollins Amistad Press, Gates, Henry Louis, Ed.; Reed, Ishmael, More than A Voodoo, Foreword copyright 1990. Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. (Copyright 1937; many editions available). Lowe, John. Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago (1994). Raines, Ben. The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning. Simon & Schuster (New York: 2022). Walker, Alice. Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and A Partisan View (1979; pages 83-92); Looking for Zora (1975l pages 93-116.) In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (New York; San Diego 1983)

Notice to MUU Fellowship Committees! It’s Time to Share Your Accomplishments! Greeting to all committee leaders. It is the time of year to write and submit a summary of your activities for 2025-2026 to be included in an Annual Report and shared at our Annual Meeting on Sunday, June 7th. Please include the highlights and accomplishments of the past Fellowship year. The reports do not need to be lengthy, but please include your committee name and your contact name (or names) in the report. This annual summary is a great way to give attention to the good work you do for all of us in the UU community (and beyond). Please provide your summary reports to Nan Perigo no later than Friday, May 15th.

Here’s some of what we need to create or find for our May 31 staging rehearsal! PROPS: Make 2 or 3 protest signs for Newsies old-fashioned luggage (early 20th c vintage) old basket with cloth covering and carrying handle farming tool with old wood handle COSTUME pieces: old fashioned boy’s caps for our Newsies old-fashioned men’s caps for Tevye and Les Mis chorus white/solid color apron and headscarf for Chava, large vintage shirt or farm-worker vest for Fyedka vintage shoulder bag for Fyedka men’s knee-high boots (size TBD) If you can supply or help find any of these props or costume pieces, or if you can be part of our production crew for this special June 14 service, please email or text or talk to Barbara Castellana Stasiak. Dress rehearsal help is needed Saturday June 13.