Beyond “Time, Talent and Treasure”
Picture a newcomer in the vestibule of your congregation next Sunday morning. Her clothes are faded, neckline stretched, hair in need of a wash and pulled back in a hasty ponytail. Dragging her hand hither and yon is a six-year-old, jeans ragged at the hems, sneakers that have seen better days, flyaway hair. She’s bubbly, bouncing on the balls of her feet, grinning at everyone, laughing uninhibitedly, excited to go to Religious Education classes and make new friends.
You help them find the other first graders, and her daughter bounces off without a qualm. As you’re walking this newcomer back to the sanctuary, she gestures out the window. “Is it okay if I leave my car there?” You note the blankets hung inside to cover the windows in the back seat and trunk of the wood-paneled station wagon. “It has everything we own in it right now. We’ve been sleeping in the car or in our tent for a few days. I left my husband down in Tennessee,” she explains blandly. “He was abusive.”
Now imagine our newcomer, on a second or third visit, signing her daughter up for Religious Education. When it comes to the registration fee, does the DRE say brightly, “That’s okay, you can volunteer in the program instead!”
Maybe our newcomer would love to share with the Neighboring Faiths class about her childhood as a Jehovah’s Witness, or is a licensed childcare provider excited to volunteer in the nursery. But what if she doesn’t have a skill the congregation needs? What if her car dies? What if she is able to find a minimum wage job and a coworker asks her to cover a Sunday morning shift that would pay for new sneakers for her child? What if she’s just too physically, mentally and spiritually exhausted by Sunday to do anything but listen from the pews? Is there still a place for her daughter in RE?
When UU World asked me if there were “something on my heart” that I would like to put into words for a guest blog post, I sat up straight and said, Yes! The response of my faith community to “Towards a More Inclusive Stewardship” has been gratifying and redemptive, but with an undertone of frustration.
Before my best friend received that stewardship letter (referred to in the UU World article), the fellowship we had grown up in found itself in financial trouble. And yet, my best friend was in crisis: disabled, a single mother, domestic violence survivor, scraping by on public assistance. How could she be expected to contribute volunteer hours equivalent to what her membership cost the church when she couldn’t afford the gas to drive there … and then her van died. All of these barriers were exactly why she needed the support of her faith community, and it was at this same moment, despite the stewardship committee’s best intentions, that she got the message that she was no longer wanted by her childhood fellowship.
By contrast, the happiest I’ve ever seen my best friend as a mother was the brief few years when the Mormon community lifted her up both spiritually and materially, although ideologically she was always a square peg in that round hole. These are the moments that churches are made for—“inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren”—and we failed.
Why do we measure a member’s inherent worth and dignity by what they have to give us as a congregation? I want mine to be a congregation that helps this mother find a place to live and an appropriate means of support, that embraces her daughter in the RE program, that includes them both in the monthly potluck, without asking for anything in return. The irony is that those to whom we give without asking, when eventually they are able to give back, will often prove our most generous, loyal supporters.
I want mine to be the stewardship committee who stands before the congregation and says, “We are a community that gives without reckoning, a tide that lifts all boats regardless of their size, shape or value. Today, if your loch, reservoir or rain barrel is full enough, we invite you to pour back into our safe harbor any bounty you can spare.”
Maryah Converse was raised Unitarian Universalist, and has been a religious education volunteer in two congregations and the Southeastern Unitarian Universalist Summer Institute (SUUSI). She was the Membership and Stewardship Associate at All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City, where she worked for four years and was an early member of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Membership Professionals (UUAMP). She teaches Arabic and English as a Second Language and blogs at bymaryah.wordpress.com.
Sexual Predators and Blue Collar Women
Finally. The manifestation of the recognition that women’s rights ARE human rights.
That’s how I’ve been feeling about the outing of so many well-known sexual predators, long known but never punished for their predatory ways. Learning about some has broken my heart. Charlie Rose was my hero, as was John Conyers.
But, like every woman I know, I’ve experienced sexual harassment or sexual assault: #metoo. And it has felt good these past few weeks (maybe good is not quite the right word) to see that our collective voice is finally be heard and believed.
But, the more I’ve sat with this feeling of justice-being-done, the more I’ve begun to feel something ever so lightly poking at my “happy bubble.” That something is a growing knowledge that sexually harassed and assaulted cis- and transgender women with limited class privilege, especially women of color, are largely absent from the conversation about workplace harassment.
#Metoo?
While high-profile, class-advantaged women have bravely come forward to accuse Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, George H.W. Bush, Roger Ailes – and on and on – of sexual assault, working-class and poor women continue to silently endure harassment and assault at sky-high rates. The male perpetrators feel no pressure to change their ways due to the increased scrutiny of predatory behavior.
They are assaulting “throwaway” women who know that if they report the assault, the odds are they will not be believed – and they will be fired, forced to move and/or further harassed. If they are believed, they will be accused of bringing it on themselves – and they too will be fired, forced to move and/or further harassed.
For example, in the new study Sexual Harassment of Women Working as Room Attendants within 5-Star Hotels 95% of the attendants reported being victims of sexual harassment or assault. The researchers cite the attendants’ low social status as the primary reason. The workers are afraid to complain, fearing retaliation by guests who will not tip them or will rate their service poorly. They are afraid to be seen as complainers by managers and fired for having a “bad attitude.”
In a Maven December 4, 2017, online forum on sexual harassment in the workplace, one woman wrote about the rampant sexual harassment and assault that women in frontline restaurant industry jobs face from coworkers, managers and patrons. “Tits get tips,” she was told. Since a number of the women in service industries are also undocumented immigrants, they are doubly vulnerable.
These are women who often work in places where there is no HR department to complain to. And as many women have said, HR is there to serve the needs of the employer, not the employees.
Status Translates to Power
I remember when working for a college in conservative upstate New York in the late 1990s, the first woman was hired by our on-campus print shop. This was touted as progress. But when the woman complained to HR about rampant sexual harassment a few months later, she was told to “man-up” by the assistant dean who also oversaw the HR department.
The women accusing Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore, President Donald Trump and President Bill Clinton are not prominent members of the upper-middle-class or owning-class. Their accusations have been challenged each step of the way. On the other hand, the women accusing Charlie Rose, Senator Al Franken and Matt Lauer have more class advantage. And their accusations are making heads roll.
#MeToo!
Tarana Burke created the Me Too catch-phrase in 2006 “as a grassroots movement to aid sexual assault survivors in underprivileged communities ‘where rape crisis centers and sexual assault workers weren’t going.’” It took owning-class women in 2017 to use the phrase to spur a nationwide-movement. It’s time for Burke’s trickle up effects to trickle back down and start supporting women with less class advantage in their quest for justice against sexual predators.
Denise Moorehead — This post originally appeared on our sister-site, Class Action
Sidewalks
by Elizabeth Cogliati
I didn’t used to think about sidewalks much. Not even in college or immediately after, when we walked everywhere because we didn’t have a vehicle. I went to college in a compact, eminently walkable small town, but even so, I believe I logged 4 plus miles every day. Looking back on it, I can’t believe I walked that much. Like I said, I didn’t think about sidewalks much. I just walked on them. Sometimes I climbed over the snowbanks, sometimes I slid on the ice, sometimes I slogged through the mud of the off-sidewalk shortcut, but I didn’t really think about the sidewalks.
When I moved to a bigger town, I had a more difficult time walking because the town’s neighborhoods are not easily connected to the downtown area and are not very walkable. This appears intentional. According to the city ordinances, all new neighborhoods after 1998 must not have straight throughfares directly across them and must have winding roads (older neighborhoods were grandfathered in).
After my baby was born, I discovered that the places I just strolled over by myself were major obstacles with a stroller– canals with no sidewalk along them, major intersections with only stop signs — these things frightened me with my stroller — how could I run across a 4-way stop intersection with 2 lanes in each direction with a stroller? Although I no longer needed to walk (we now had a reliable vehicle), walking was still the only form of transportation for many who did not have access to personal transportation. These sidewalks were vital arteries to the community and to needed resources.
When my baby was almost a year old, we moved into a house in one of the older neighborhoods in our town. It was easier to walk with the stroller– there were blocks and blocks of quiet neighborhood streets without busy intersections. But here I discovered another problem: the sidewalks were in pretty bad shape — large cracks, shifted sections where one section was several inches higher than the neighboring one, holes, and even non-existent sections. I became an expert at lifting the stroller up and over the many obstructions we encountered in our walks.
The more I walked, the more I noticed another problem. I didn’t just have to lift the stroller over frost heaves and root uprisings, I often had to lift it over the curbs at the intersections. There were no curb cuts at many of the intersections (a curb cut is the place where the curb dips down to meet the gutter at a driveway, intersection, or parking area). A proper curb cut usually has a yellow pad with raised dimples to alert blind walkers using a cane that they are approaching an intersection.
About this same time, I began writing opinion pieces for the local newspaper. I decided to write one of my first columns on the sidewalks in the town and their terrible condition. After the column was published, I got a surprise. Individuals in wheelchairs called and wrote to tell me how much they appreciated my column and how badly they needed better sidewalks. For people with different mobility, sidewalks can grant or block access to buildings for both recreation and much-needed resources.
I wrote a couple more columns on sidewalks, attracting more attention each time. After those columns, the city applied for and received a federal grant to improve sidewalk conditions in the business districts of town by adding curb cuts and yellow pads.
My town also has a city government program where the city will pay for homeowners to fix their sidewalks if they cannot afford to do so themselves. When I suggested this program to my neighbor, she told me she couldn’t use the program. Why? Because the program was a reimbursement program. She would have to pay up front to have the sidewalks fixed and then be reimbursed by the city. She did not have the up front money, and there were no alternatives in the city program.
When I watch the people going past my window, I see my neighbors walking their dogs, I see children going back and forth to school, I sometimes see mothers with strollers, I see white men riding bicycles in the street to work – they are usually dressed in professional attire, and I see Latino/a men and women walking with groceries and backpacks – going to and from the store and work.
Or, to put it another way, I see a variety of people from different class groups and ethnic backgrounds using the sidewalks. For some of them, riding bikes and walking are choices that make them, their children, their pets, and the planet healthier. For others, these are the only forms of transportation they can afford. If I lived near the business districts, I would also see people in wheelchairs or with canes relying on the sidewalks to enter and exit buildings.
Sidewalks are an important shared part of a community’s life. They are not a luxury item that can be neglected. The health of our sidewalks directly affects the safety of the people who rely on them every day. Sidewalks are a class issue and a disability issue.
This post has been modified to correct editorial errors that conflicted with the author’s original meaning.
UU Class Conversations at GA 2014
General Assembly 2014 was amazing, and UU Class Conversations definitely lifted above our weight during the June 25-29 event in Providence R.I. From holding a standing room only workshop to speaking in favor of Escalating Inequality as the 2014-2018 Congregational Study/Action Issue (CSAI), our volunteers were seemingly everywhere. (more…)
