By Karin Elsen, UTO Board President and chair of the Formation and Development Committee
UTO has had a great start to the year and is finding new ways to support spiritual growth. With seasonal resources and partnerships, we are dedicated to helping everyone in the church grow in gratitude. Here’s what’s coming up soon:
Quarterly Training Day: Aug. 22 at 8 a.m. Eastern time
The next quarterly training day will focus on grant support and fall formation materials. You may have noticed a slight delay in releasing the 2027 grant materials. That is because we received help from past UTO grant applicants and did a major revision of the application materials, and they are just taking a bit longer to get online then they usually do. That means that this training day is very important for anyone working to support applicants in their diocese, so be sure to register here.
Seasonal Materials for Fall
It is time to order your UTO materials for the fall! This year our materials are not date-specific, so you can use them whenever it makes the most sense for your congregation. The goal of our fall materials is to help all of us fall back into our gratitude routines, so we’ve created an updated five-minute gratitude journal based on feedback from users and fans of our first edition. For young people, we’ve got a cool sticker (if you order from the shop) and a five-week program to help connect things in our lives that we might be grateful for with recent UTO grants. (Note: While these were made for kids, they are easily adaptable to use with adults.) A big thank-you to a UTO leader who suggested this idea and was willing to give us time to develop it for everyone. We think that it will be a great resource for all congregations.
We’ve also updated our fall materials page to simplify finding the resources to download. We’ve created sections: individuals and families, congregations, and evergreen resources. We hope this will help everyone find what they are looking for without too much scrolling. We’ve created the evergreen section because we know sometimes you really love something we created in the past, and as long as it wasn’t overly connected to a date, we wanted to make that available to you. Find all fall resources at https://unitedthankoffering.com/fall/ or order your kit at https://unitedthankoffering.com/shop/. Please note that we ask everyone to order by Sept. 18 so we can order the correct number of materials. Kits will ship after Sept. 29. If you need materials earlier, please email Heather (hmelton@episcopalchurch.org); and if we have extra materials, they will remain available in the shop until sold out.
