By Sherri Dietrich, UTO Board President

We all get surveys from time to time, and we often ignore them, but I encourage you to complete the newly released UTO Member Survey via this link because your answers are important in shaping UTO’s programs in the next few years. Because we have no membership fees or required registration processes, we can only guess who participates in UTO based on their participation in webinars, grant applications, and to some extent, parish Ingathering information. We are beginning to get information on how many parishes participate because we now encourage parishes to register as UTO parishes. But how many people in the parish participate? How many individuals who don’t regularly attend church are part of the UTO community?

Your survey answers will help us create the resources you actually want and need to deepen your personal gratitude practice and to share UTO’s work in your parishes, dioceses, and with other individuals inside and outside the church. We also want to know how much time and money our coordinators put into their work for UTO; we know you are dedicated and invest your own time and money in working for UTO. But justice is an important value to the UTO Board, and we want to ensure that everyone with the desire to be a UTO coordinator can take the job, whether or not they have enough of their own money to spend on materials. There are questions on the survey that will tell us which resources you are using and loving and which ones aren’t serving their purpose. We shouldn’t continue to support resources that aren’t doing the job we thought they would do, and your answers to these questions will guide us toward creating resources that better promote UTO and help UTO member-practitioners. 

Finally, what things would you like to do for UTO but need something that will support you in that work? You don’t have to tell us exactly what resource you need, just tell us what you want to accomplish, and we will try to figure out what resources we can create to do that. Episcopalians know the value of rituals, but even the most beloved rituals can become rote and lose their impact. Are resources like the venerable Blue Box still helping people practice gratitude, or do we need to look for something else? 

There is always more to learn about gratitude, and we want to know how to help everyone practice gratitude throughout their lifetime while keeping it always fresh. Please take the time to fill out the member survey and help us keep gratitude going in our troubled world. In thanks for your time, you will be entered into a raffle where one lucky winner will receive a $50 Bookshop.org gift card!