UTO Grants Growing But Needs Double
Episcopal News Service. October 27, 1983 [83192]
NEW YORK (DPS, Oct. 27) -- With Episcopalians continuing to stretch, the United Thank Offering Committee was able to approve $2,503,930.26 in grants for this year. The amount available to grant was $18,600 over the 1982 figure, continuing the modest increases seen each year in this extra-budgetary program of prayer and giving.
Coins and bills of thanksgiving that have accumulated in small Blue Boxes since last September will make possible many new mission outreach programs in both the United States and around the globe in the coming year. Multi-service "Jubilee" type ministry centers from West Texas to Kansas to North Carolina will be enabled to function as a result of grants for equipment and building needs. New models of ministry to prevent child abuse and teenage delinquency, to provide caring Christian response to prisoners and their families and to meet the basic needs of homeless, hungry and disabled Americans are included on the list of 64 grants that will support mission and ministry in domestic dioceses.
Forty-three grants, on the list of 111, will strengthen Anglican partner churches and the overseas Episcopal dioceses to carry out the Lord's mission in their local situation. Black Anglicans, ruthlessly resettled in one of South Africa's "homeland reserves", will have a place to worship and begin serving the many social needs of new arrivals, children of single parent families in Puerto Rico and Western Samoa will have an opportunity for early childhood education and care, indigenous sisterhoods in Bangladesh and Zambia will be enabled to better serve the poor and struggling in their communities as the result of these grants.
For every grant listed on the grant list, however, there is at least one other project or program that could not receive a grant this year. To try to respond more fully to all the needs represented in the applications each year, the United Thank Offering network of provincial, diocesan and parish representatives urges all Episcopalians to begin the "Blue Box habit" of pausing daily to reflect quietly on the blessings in their life and to respond with coins of thanksgiving to God.
The United Thank Offering is unique in that all of the offering, except the 3 ½ to 4 percent used to provide interpretive materials, goes directly to grant programs and projects. All of the other minimal administrative expenses of the UTO are covered by the church program budgets at the local, diocesan and national levels.
United Thank Offering Committee members who make the difficult decisions each year are elected representatives of each of the nine Provinces in the Episcopal Church. They include: Province I: Mrs. Barbara Shaw (Massachusetts), Province II: Mrs. Thelma Blaine, (New Jersey), Province III: Mrs. Marilyn Wilkerson, (Washington), Province IV: Mrs. Marie Rogers, (Lexington), Province V: Mrs. Betty Clarke (Southern Ohio), Province VI, Mrs. Inez Harris, (South Dakota), Province VII, Mrs. Mark Jones (Texas), Province VIII, Mrs. Lyn Johnson, (San Diego), Province IX, Senora Emma Hooker de Rojas (Nicaragua); as well as three at-large members: Mrs. Betty Phillips (Western New York), Committee Chair, Mrs. Roberta Montgomery, (Olympia), Vice-Chair, Mrs. Barbara Gehring, (Rio Grande), and Executive Council liaison Mr. Paul Frank, (Ohio).