by Margie Manning, Southern Region Communications Task Force
With congregations in the UUA Southern Region moving towards stronger relationships and greater interdependence, we’ve also put in place a funding model that mirrors the covenantal nature of our faith.
GIFT – or Generously Investing For Tomorrow – is in its second year, and increasingly congregations are seeing this program as a way to deepen our connections with each other, with the region and with the UUA.
GIFT takes us out of a transactional relationship between congregations and the UUA, said Bill Clontz, UUA Stewardship Consultant. The Annual Program Fund and former District dues were based on per capita contributions and could feel like a head tax or a poll tax, while GIFT “gets out of the head count business and on a level plane,” Clontz said.
Under GIFT, a full ask is 7 percent of the actual operating expenditures of a congregation. While APF was a set number, based on membership, GIFT takes into account budget changes; if revenue falls, spending is likely to drop as well, and the percentage of that allocated for GIFT would decline.
“GIFT is the financial version of a potluck dinner,” Clontz said. “Everyone brings what they can.”
In the first year of GIFT, for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2014, contributions were $1.75 million, compared to $1.95 million in the prior fiscal year, when collections were based on APF and District dues. Regional and UUA executives had anticipated a drop-off in the initial year of the program, and the UUA provided the Southern Region with a $75,000 subsidy to offset the impact.
In the first year, congregations that contributed a minimum of 5 percent of their actual operating expenditures were considered Honor congregations; that will shift in the current year, with 6 percent contributors receiving the Honor designation but 7 percent remaining the full ask.
One significant outcome from the first year of GIFT – there were more than 500 additional members reported to the UUA from congregations in the Southern Region than in 2013, according to the Stewardship & Development Office.
With the former APF/District dues system, there could be a temptation to fudge the numbers, setting up an oppositional relationship, Clontz said. In contrast, GIFT is covenantal.
“It reminds us that the UUA is us, we support it,” Clontz said. “It’s caused a lot of congregations to ask a fundamental question – what’s the point of being in the UUA, what do we get out of it, what happens to the money.”
To address that question, the UUA has developed an extensive report on what accrues from membership in the association [LINK: http://www.uua.org/giving/apf/stewardship/185486.shtml] . “No one thinks you will need a mediator or have a shooting in your church, but the UUA provides help when you need it,” Clontz said.
And while it’s perfectly acceptable to ask what a congregation gets for its money, that’s only half the question. “There’s lots of things we could not do as individual congregations,” Clontz said. “The UUA and Region work on national and international levels and we give them the resources to do our work.”
Clontz cited the hundreds of people from 30 UU congregations who responded to a call and showed up wearing their yellow ‘Standing on the Side of Love’ T-shirts as the U.S. Supreme Court convened for the session to consider the Marriage Equality Act. “We can be 1,000 individual congregations, little candles in the dark, or we can be a connected grid.”
The Southern Region Communications Task Force includes Margie Manning (Florida
District), Carrie Stewart (SWUUC), Kirk Bogue (MidSouth), and Chris Reid (Florida),
working in shared ministry with Kathy McGowan (Congregational Life Staff), and Christine Purcell (IT Specialist).
