Faith & the Common Good, Halton Environmental Network, Greening Sacred Spaces Halton-Peel, and an array of partners will be working together over the next year, thanks to funding received from the Oakville Community Foundation (OCF), to pilot an Oakville neighbourhood extreme weather resilience hub model using places of worship and other neighbourhood organizations as neighbourhood engagement and care anchors.  The goal is to create an Oakville resiliency hub network that engages diverse community stakeholders to increase community capacity and understanding around how we can work to support each other.  The Project plan is to pilot “neighbourhood hubs” in 3 geographic hubs based in the community of Oakville.

Congratulations to our Greening Sacred Spaces Halton-Peel chapter (with a special shout-out to Laura Irvine) who helped organize this year’s One Burlington Festival using the Green Rule as an organizing theme.

The ecumenical Season of Creation runs from September 1^st to October 4^th, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, and invites Christians around the world to pray and care for creation. Several resource suggestions are offered below to help with planning a Season of Creation event. They can be adapted for other times as well.

The Jaffari Community Centre is a proud member of ClimateWise Business Network. The organization is currently participating in Faith & the Common Good’s energy benchmarking program.

The Jaffari Community Centre’s sustainability journey demonstrates how passionate people can impact the way a community acts on climate change. A few like-minded women were the forerunners of a sustainability movement that effectively shifted the way community members think and act. Their “Eco team”, which started five years ago with a grass roots approach to reducing waste is now a fully integrated eight-member Eco Board, working to improve the Centre’s overall sustainability method.

Laudato Si’ Conference photo courtesy of Patrick Nicholson

An international conference took place on July 5-6, 2018 in Vatican City to celebrate the third anniversary of Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ letter on care for our common home. The conference aimed to communicate “a sense of deep urgency and profound concern for the precarious state of our common planetary home”. The Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development organized the conference in collaboration with partners such as the Global Catholic Climate Movement. Representatives of churches, religions, civil society, scientists, politicians, economists, grassroots movements, and others gathered to dialogue and develop some participatory lines of action.

Across the country, United Churches are doing their part to address the climate crisis by getting their own house in order by working to reduce their own carbon emissions. Through a partnership with Faith & the Common Good, the United Church of Canada is offering grants and support for churches to measure their energy use and reduce their climate pollution, in ways that save money and strengthen congregational renewal.

Our 2017 Annual Report captures the diverse ways in which the network lived out the Green Rule and made good use of our many programs last year. We looked at regenerating places of worship to better serve our communities, and exploring how, as faith communities, we can be resilience hubs in readying ourselves for extreme weather events before disaster strikes. Our network members grew communities by planting and tending gardens in cities and towns and participating in the Faith Commuter Challenge to get to worship without cars. Many of us accompanied Indigenous groups as allies, in protecting the life-giving waters of the land’s Great Lakes. Together, we came closer to the goal of a healthy, sustainable future for the common good of all people.

Iris, Vivian, and June enjoy the social aspect of carpooling, the most popular mode of transportation to church.

The following report was submitted by Maureen Peniuk of Crescent Fort Rouge United Church, Winnipeg. At the bottom of this post, you can find our participation statistics for 2018.

We improved our Faith Commuter Challenge participation rate to 80%! Last year it was 70%. What a fun way to celebrate the sustainable ways that we commute to church and “Live with Respect in Creation”. Carpooling (51%) is our preferred “green’ form of transportation to church. Walking (18%) is the second most popular mode, with transit (8%) and cycling (3%) much less common. The remaining 20% drive alone.