The UTO Board and staff are thrilled to announce Raising Grateful Voices, a new opportunity to gather together to learn, share, and experience UTO Grant sites. This triennium, UTO will be offering annual regional gatherings in conjunction with other complementary gatherings in The Episcopal Church in different regions of the country. This year, we are partnering with Missional Voices and Christ Church Cathedral in New Orleans. Missional Voices was started by a group of seminarians a few years ago to provide a forum for important conversations about mission and the growing edge of the Church, making it a natural partner for UTO. (We are pleased to share that a representative of Jericho Road, a UTO Grant site, will be one of the featured speakers at Missional Voices.)

We’ve designed our time together to try to keep costs at a minimum. We’ll begin after lunch on Wednesday, June 12, and end at lunchtime on Thursday, June 13. We’re pleased to announce that our keynote speaker for the UTO closing event is Kids Orchestra from Baton Rouge, Louisiana who will present some of the practices the group started thanks to a UTO Grant. In between, we’re offering a ton of great workshops, from Introduction to Asset-Based Community Development, Gratitude and Faith Formation, and Grant Writing Best Practices to all of our usual UTO offerings on best financial practices and ways to promote UTO. Oh, and we’ll be sure to have traditional New Orleans snacks at break time in addition to giving you time to enjoy the city while you’re with us. We are so very excited about this event and all of the great workshop presenters and speakers. To learn more and see the full schedule, head on over to www.episcopalchurch.org/uto. (We’ll have the full workshop booklet posted soon!) Registration for the full event is just $40, and you can register here. Please email Heather if you need more information about this event.

You do not need to attend the Missional Voices gathering (MV19) in order to attend Raising Grateful Voices; however, if you would like to attend MV19, the organizers are offering a special rate of $74 for UTO – simply use the code MVUTO at checkout. (You can register for MV19 here and find all of the hotel information and special rates on the Missional Voices page.)

More information on Missional Voices:
MV19 will bring together church leaders, seminarians, church planters, entrepreneurs, artists, and everyday innovators to discuss creative ministries and missional communities both within and outside the traditional church context.We are working on the detailed schedule, but here’s what you can expect from each day…

Thursday, June 13
What gifts do our communities offer? What assets exist in our neighborhoods? Where is God already working among us? When individuals and parishes go through disasters, they learn to view their communities in new ways. Leaders from Episcopal Relief & Development will guide us through some practices to help us do that same work, before a disaster happens.

Friday, June 14
Six innovative voices will share their stories, and then we will reflect together on where we see God at work in those stories. We’ll hear from people leading parishes, refugee resettlement agencies, campus ministries, a worshipping community inside a prison, and more.

Saturday, June 15
This is where we get to practice what we’ve learned. On Saturday, leaders from around the Church will guide us through hands-on sessions, during which we learn tools and strategies to help us in our communities.