Thursday October 8 2020
1. First off, in this Thanksgiving edition of New Vision Notes, a shout out to Rev. Miriam Spies whose thoughtful in-the-moment piece on imagining profounder relationships in the new reality ahead was published by Sojourner.net this week. Highly recommended Thanksgiving reading from this quarter!
2. New Vision has secured continued funding from the City for the Resting and Hygiene Centre for people sleeping rough through to November 11. We are engaging in discussions with the City and with our volunteer coordinators over how to reposition the Centre to be open for the winter as part of the public health response to the already emerging second wave of COVID-19 in Hamilton.
3. The Centre continues in its fond appreciation for baked goods and other snacks you provide to it to share with its guests. Please contact Martine (martini.sings@gmail.com) or Helen (helen.bradleyrd@gmail.com) for assistance with getting baking to the Centre.
4. New Vision’s primary role in our capital campaign for the Music Hall at New Vision is to build social capital through an intercultural consultation with Hamilton’s diverse communities with whom we will develop a cultural benefits memorandum, and embed with them the Music Halls’ role in providing those benefits in a social enterprise charter that will be implemented in the Music Hall’s governance and operating structure. We began our prepatory work for the consultation last Sunday, when we took in an overview of the Bennett Development Model for Intercultural Sensitivity. You can watch the 10 minute video describing the model here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vKRFH2Wm6Y. We will begin organizing our consultation engagement in the next week and look forward to your participation and insights!
5. You can watch the launch video for the Do Well by Hamilton capital campaign for the Music Hall at New Vision anytime at dowellbyhamilton.ca, the campaign website.
6. We are going to maintain our virtual worship gathering on Sundays as they are for the time being into the future. We are working on developing an accessibility option at 24 Main West in which those who cannot join our virtual worship gathering elsewhere can join in an in-person gathering at our building at 24 Main West that is enfolded in our ongoing virtual worship. We realize that a “temperature-taking” gathering on how we are all doing that includes both those who have technological access to New Vision virtually and those who remain in the in-person world is plausibly our next step to discerning an imaginable future with more inclusive relationships amongst us. We keep in place our phone network to sustain our faith across the digital divide. We admit we miss those we don’t see.
7. New Vision Virtual Worship is experiential, participatory, image-rich and collective, just like worship in person at New Vision! Join us on Sunday mornings 10:30 am week to week during the Covid-19 emergency by clicking here. If you want to put the link someplace easy to find each week, here it is: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/782292511. Please share it with others and invite them to a “different” kind of time on Zoom from the usual.
8. You can also call in to the gathering on the telephone toll free. Call 1 855 703 8985, then, when prompted, input the Meeting ID 782 292 511 followed by the # sign. Ignore the prompts for Participant ID and Password. You are in when the recorded voice says, “You are in the meeting.” If you can only connect by video on your computer with no audio, you can use the phone connection for audio and the computer connection for visual.
9. For updates on New Vision plans in the post Covid-19 emergency recovery, please visit http://newvisionunited.org/new-vision-covid-19-updates/.
Hope to see you on Sunday – again, or for the first time!
Rev Ian