CURRENT PROJECTS:
Brown Bag Lunches
The Caring Team, on the first Sunday of each month, organizes an assembly line to make bag lunches for The Upper Room, a daytime homeless shelter in Erie. Each month, shortly after the conclusion of our service, we make and deliver up to 150 lunches to the Upper Room’s daytime homeless shelter.
Memory Cafe
A memory café is a gathering place for people with dementia and their care partners to relax and enjoy conversation, refreshments, and entertainment. A memory cafe has no other purpose than its guests enjoying each other’s company.
We do enjoy each other’s company on the first and third Thursday of each month, from 1:00 – 3:00 (with one month of summer holiday-usually August)
Our Neighbor’s Place
Our Neighbor’s Place is an overflow shelter for those without a place to stay during the winter months. Unitarian Universalist members donate money, purchase food, prepare, cook, and serve complete hot meals regularly through the season.
Highway Pickup
For more than a decade the members at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Erie have been cleaning 2 1/2 miles of roadway along Perry Highway from E. Gore Rd. south to our facility.
Prison Ministry at SCI Albion with 4 Buddhist Sangha members
Pema Chodron, an ordained Buddhist nun, writes of compassion and suggests that “its truest measure lies not in our service of those on the margins, but in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them.” Kinship is what we feel with the group of inmates from SCI Albion when we provide a Buddhist Sangha twice monthly. Since 2019 we have been meeting with these men for meditation and sharing the dharma. We feel fortunate to be with them, as they are great examples of living your practice…of following the Buddhist principles to relieve suffering–their own and others. Spiritual friendship is a gift we share with them.
Marches and Parades
As a congregation we come together to support:
- The ideas of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr during Erie’s annual MLK Jr. March
- Local trade and labor organizations at the annual Labor Day Parade
- Our LGBTQIA+ community at the annual Pride Parade
PAST PROJECTS:
Climate March
We are proud to have been a co-sponsor of Erie’s Climate March and Rally. With 30 UUCE members swelling ranks of the 500 participating marchers we showed our strong support for issues relating to clean air, clean water, and our planet’s health.
ServErie
ServErieMembers of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Erie enjoyed working with ServErie to revitalize Erie High School.
