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All Souls’ efforts awarded
By: Kelli Bamforth, Staff writer
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All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, 4501 Walnut St., is one of 50 faith communities across the nation honored for environmental stewardship.
The Sierra Club, a grassroots environmental organization, recently released its new “Faith in Action: Communities of Faith Bring Hope for The Planet” report, recognizing one faith-based environmental initiative from each state.
“The Sierra Club is deeply grateful to the religious communities highlighted in this report and so many others across America who are bringing renewed interest, energy and unique perspectives to the environmental conversation while taking the lead on finding solutions to our environmental challenges,” Melissa Hope, Missouri Sierra Club, said. “It is encouraging that in the face of unprecedented environmental challenges like global warming, people from all walks of life are coming together to make a difference.”
Village Presbyterian Church, Prairie Village, Kan., joined All Souls as Kansas’ highlighted faith community in a presentation Friday, June 20.
Frank Drinkwine, All Souls’ green sanctuary committee chairman, said the church embarked in 2001 on an action plan to achieve accreditation by the Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Earth.
“The process required to achieve that accreditation involved creating an action plan involving four different areas of church-related activity,” Drinkwine said. “The four areas are worship services and celebrations, sustainable living, education and environmental justice. As a congregation, social justice is a large part of the church’s mission within the community … something we think is overlooked is the environmental justice aspect of that.”
Drinkwine said environmental justice affects everyone, but those hurt most by rising energy costs are people who can least afford it.
“People most affected by concentrations of pollution and landfills are often the poorest segments of the population,” he said. “There’s a disproportionate burden of health consequences and other issues related to environmental degradation and they’re the least able to fight it.”
As part of All Souls’ action plan, church members volunteer with Kansas City’s Greenworks, an organization that works to foster career and life skills through environmental stewardship. Students gain employable skills in what Drinkwine called “the green revolution.”
“The whole idea is that as we look for ways to conserve energy, that evolution creates new types of employment opportunities,” Drinkwine said. “(Greenworks) helps students prepare to take advantage of that. Our involvement as a congregation is really to support that type of program which is an environmental and social justice type of action.”
All Souls also hosts “Eat Your Values” lunches, with the goal of supporting locally produced, organic, low-waste foods. Plant-oriented diets are more earth-friendly, Drinkwine said.
“We love the convenience of picking up a bag of premade salad somewhere, not thinking about the environmental impact of consuming that,” Drinkwine said. “This idea at first was a break from the traditional way of buying a huge thing of lasagna from Sam’s Club and throwing it in the oven. You can actually have some pretty good (plant-oriented) meals with some planning and thinking.”
All Souls also employs a recycling program and is taking steps toward becoming more energy-efficient. The church is planning a substantial remodel or building a new green facility in terms of materials used and energy consumption.
“As a (green sanctuary) committee, our commitment is not about being in your face about green this or green that,” Drinkwine said. “We want to broaden people’s awareness of more sustainable choices … with the collective results of individual choices ultimately comes a really powerful tool for change.
“The one thing on everybody’s mind right now is the cost of gasoline … one way to save gas is to choose to walk or bike or take public transit, or ride with somebody else. One action item we had is a Sustainable Transportation Sunday in which we encouraged people to come to work that way. That’s a simple thing we could do that has an impact.”
Contact Kelli Bamforth at 385-6024 or kellibamforth@sunpublications.com.