For Congregational Leaders: Side With Love’s Priorities, Fall 2026

Announcement
Written By Side With Love

Dear Congregational Leader,

Thank you for your service to your congregation and community!

We are the UUA’s Organizing Strategy Staff Team. We run Side With Love, our infrastructure for movement building. Learn more about Side With Love by watching our workshop from this year’s General Assembly which talks a little about our history, our current issue priorities, and our top resources and programs.

We want to highlight Side With Love’s three main programs for fall 2026 and one that kicks off in 2027!

Additionally, we’ll be opening applications for congregational teams for Tending SOIL, our congregational justice team leadership training, and we hope your congregation joins us! 

Finally, we want to update you on the social witness process and share some of our top resources.

Read on for information about each of our programs and how your congregation can engage.

The Gathering

The Gathering is Side With Love's monthly virtual event, a space to strengthen your spirit, make sense of the political moment, and take meaningful action alongside Unitarian Universalists and justice-seekers across the country. (Wondering what it’s like? Watch our trailer to get a sense of the experience!)

Each month, we come together to ground ourselves spiritually, deepen our political analysis, and move into action together. Because we know that the work of justice is not sustained by urgency alone. It is sustained by community, nourishment, and the practice of returning again and again to the vision of the world we are building.

As the US marks 250 years, this fall The Gathering will examine the limits and possibilities of American democracy and our sacred call to shape a multiracial, interdependent democracy where everyone can thrive at Side With Love’s monthly event to strengthen your spirit, make sense of the threats to democracy, and take meaningful action alongside others! 

 

UU the Vote: Solidarity Summits

As part of UU the Vote 2026: Ignite Solidarity, Reimagine Democracy, Solidarity Summits are regional interfaith justice training and practice gatherings designed to strengthen the connections, skills, and capacities needed for this moment.

These gatherings bring together Unitarian Universalists, people of faith across traditions, lay leaders, organizers, advocates, and community partners to strengthen regional networks, deepen relationships, and practice the kind of solidarity this moment demands. 

Join a Solidarity Summit in your area! You can also host your own!

Community Defense and Safety Training Series

The Democracy Defense and Community Safety Training series is designed to expand our capacity for election protection and neighborhood defense. We will share concrete safety tools and practices for our collective wellbeing. Drop in to one or each of these trainings!

Our Recommended Resources

Green Sanctuary 2030 Community Meeting Series

Climate justice calls us to respond with urgency and moral clarity.  Honoring the interdependent web of existence, we commit to cultivating communities of care so that all beings can flourish and thrive.

This is not simply an environmental issue. It is a spiritual and ethical commitment to one another and to the Earth itself. We partner with movements and coalitions working on the frontlines of climate justice, and we support congregations to transform their communities through initiatives like Green Sanctuary 2030: Mobilizing for Climate Justice and the UU Climate Justice Revival.

The new Green Sanctuary 2030: Mobilizing for Climate Justice offers a flexible, manageable, and impactful process to support UUs in transforming their congregations through climate justice.  Our monthly community meetings nurture resilient, thriving communities through climate actions that prioritize justice. All are invited to join us to learn together, support each other, and celebrate progress.

Tending SOIL: Leadership Program for Congregational Justice Teams

Tending SOIL is Side with Love's leadership program for Unitarian Universalists doing justice and organizing work in their congregations who want to work with others to more faithfully and strategically engage in the transformation of the world through liberating Love.  

Through SOIL, congregational or regional teams of 3-5 participants will strengthen their Skills, develop their Organizing Plan, practice Interdependence within and beyond their congregation, and deepen their understanding of Collective Liberation (ie, SOIL!)  

Applications are due October 30th, 2026. The program runs January - August 2027 

Info Session

Social Witness Process: 2024-2027 Congregational Study Action Issue (CSAI): Abolition, Transformation, and Faith Formation

At General Assembly 2027, delegates will vote whether to adopt the Congregational Study Action Issue (CSAI): Abolition, Transformation, and Faith Formation as a Statement of Conscience.

Want to learn more about Abolition and what this CSAI means for our faith? In addition to two workshops from GA 2026, there is a robust learning hub from Church of the Larger Fellowship which includes monthly conversations as well as recordings from previous sessions and additional resources.

Upcoming Monthly Conversations on Abolition

Workshops on the CSAI from General Assembly 2026

  • Imagining Abolition: From the founding of this country, coercion and punishment have been used as a way to enforce compliance. This can be seen from parenting, schooling and the way business is conducted. Our faith calls us to critique the theology of punishment that has become so prominent. This begins when we start to imagine other ways to live that are, perhaps, idealistic, but that hold the seeds of how we move into a loving, healing, holistic practice of living in the world.

  • Abolition in Practice: This workshop will include a panel of leaders who practice abolition in its many variations. Panelists will discuss abolition as a spiritual practice, abolition as seen in Minneapolis, abolition in police and prison settings, and how abolition intersects with the way we approach environmental justice.

Side With Love
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