 Welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. We're so glad to have you tuning in to this financial reflection today. I am Executive Director Monica Nolan, and I am joined today by Rev. Kelly Cracker and Roger Birchhausen, musician Drew Collins and our AV tech Dan Carnes, as well as Board President Terry Pepper who will lead in our chalice lighting. At First Unitarian Society, we gather to grow our souls, connect with one another, and embody our UU values in our lives and within and beyond the real and virtual walls of our congregation. For the last decade or so, we've held a financial forum shortly before our spring parish meeting in which we vote on a proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year. It's an opportunity for those that are interested to dive deeper into FUS's finances. Now, this year we're trying something a little different. We'll offer up some of our reflections on our budget and financial orientations in this video and then we'll invite you to join us in an interactive virtual financial forum on Zoom immediately following service next weekend, Sunday, June 6th at 11 a.m. In small groups, we'll ask you to consider and discuss some ethical questions that the Board of Trustees, Finance Committee and staff leadership team feel are at the heart of the decisions that we make about how to align our Unitarian Universalist values and our resources. We'll also invite you to review the proposed budget for 2021-2022, which you can see in the slides at the beginning and end of this video and send in your questions to myself and the Finance Committee at monicaen at FUSMadison.org. We'll compile a list of frequently asked questions and distribute in meeting materials for the parish meeting being held on June 13th at 11.30. And I invite you now to join in a moment of silence to center yourselves. We invite you to bring yourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. We like this chalice in the spirit of imagination that calls us together for the commitment to become collaborators together and in the hope that we may be sensitive and courageous in the journey we extend further today. Our opening words today come from Dan Hodges' essay entitled, Green Eyeshades and Rose-Colored Glasses. Congregational budget makers frequently divide into two camps that approach the task in different ways. The first camp is likely to include children of the Great Depression, experts in finance, elementary school teachers, and persons anxious about their own money situation. Their first priority is to make sure that the budget balances and that the congregation makes no plans or commitments. It is less than 100% certain it can meet. They squint over budget sheets like bookkeepers of old with their bright lamps and shoulder garters. I call this camp the Green Eyeshades. The second camp typically includes young clergy, upscale decorators, baby boomers, college professors and commissioned salespeople. They firmly believe that with God or even without God, all things are possible. They say, we are a congregation, not a business. This camp can be identified at budget meetings mostly by their absence. When Shanghai into talking about money, they glaze over. Staring at a distant sunrise, they float over in the surface of numerical reality. I call them the Rose-Colored Glasses. The division between the eyeshades and the glasses, this is old as Mary and Martha, Moses and Erin, Job and Job's wife. It is as deeply rooted in our culture as the duality of secular and sacred, temporal and spiritual. There's nothing wrong with it, so long as people see themselves as members of one team and value one another's contributions. But too often the division becomes rigid. One group always thinks of ways to spend more money. The other always says we can't afford it. It certainly forms part of the tension between clergy called to transform lives and boards elected to control purse strings, especially when they understand their roles that way. The budget process often sets up friction between the glasses and the eyeshades. Typically the word goes out for each program unit to request a budget for next year. Knowing how these things work, program committees full of rosy thinkers ask for more than they expect and then some. A finance committee strapping on their eyeshades puts all of the requests onto a spreadsheet as a dream budget. Usually even the dream budget gets trimmed quite a bit, making it resemble the green eyeshade's own fiscally sound dreams. The fund drive naturally falls short of the dream goal. How could it not? Calling a goal a dream almost guarantees that you'll fall short. The finance committee sharpens its pencils and begins grinding the dream down to a practical numb. The program people rise up asking, how can we say we can't afford what God has called us to accomplish? The finance people answer, good stewards live within their means. The green eyeshades with their pencils and their spreadsheets go to battle with the rose colored glasses armed with blunt and scissors opera glasses and pink feathers. It is not a pretty picture. Sometimes the roses win the day until they've run up deficits and the greens come like an exasperated crew of parents to clean up after them. If the greens win too consistently, the roses trade their glasses in for blinders and quit dreaming, sad. Nothing can do away with the division between green and rose. It is too deeply rooted in the temperaments and histories of the players. But if we can't change human nature, we can at least stop setting up the budget process to bring out the worst in us. In the opening reading, we heard Dan Hotchka say that in the creation of a congregational budget, one group always thinks of ways to spend more money while the other always says we can't afford it. In the finance committee's discussion of this essay, one of our members, Paul Stang noted that this sounds remarkably like many marriages. This tension between a tendency towards frugality or abundance when healthy can result in an ideal balance and perhaps even better decision-making. When unhealthy, it can result in divisiveness, resentment and inequality. I'd suggest we avoid unnecessary binary thinking when reflecting on our personal financial orientations. I'd invite you to imagine a spectrum recognizing where you land the majority of the time, noting that the complex nuances of each circumstance may occasionally result in you appearing on the opposite side of where you may typically gravitate. Perhaps in your household, you tend to save carefully, for example, counting your pennies except when moved by emotional requests for generosity. For the sake of this analysis, I think we can hold the complexity of our unique financial orientations while also exploring a simplified picture of two dichotomous perspectives. Remember, Hotchkiss paints a picture of the programmatic folks, the visionaries, the rose-colored glasses, and the fiscal conservatives, the budget balancers, the green eye shades. Hotchkiss urges us to avoid rigid divisions between these camps. So how do you relate to your partner who, for example, prefers to adhere to a more deliberate philanthropic giving schedule or perhaps values other charitable organizations than you do? I'm sure we can all recall at least one conflict arising over the years, stemming from diverging financial preferences. Many of us can probably conjure quite a few more. At FUS, I'm curious, do you think the divisions have become too rigid? Does each camp value the other's contributions? We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this and the Hotchkiss article at next week's financial forum. In the article, Hotchkiss goes on to explore four systemic ways to avoid this divide. He says that though divisions between green eye shades and rose-colored glasses will never go away, it can be addressed by first creating a vision of ministry and setting up a budget process that brings out the best in us and our congregation and allows us to intentionally align with our Unitarian Universalist principles with our resources. The first step, the board's creation of a vision of ministry should answer the question, what aspects of our mission will be our top priorities next year? The FUS Board of Trustees has made awesome progress on this front this year, creating three succinct, compelling priorities that have helped guide the work of staff and our ministry teams throughout the year. Given our ministerial transition, we anticipate that the same vision of ministry, which lifts up fostering a sense of community and self-compassion, addressing oppressive systems in ourselves and in our congregation, and beginning a new chapter of ministerial leadership will continue to guide our work next fiscal year. In the fall of 2021, our ministerial team, Kelly, looks forward to leading us in a collaborative exploration and articulation of our shared mission, which will in turn inform the vision of ministry we create for the 2022-2023 church year. The board adopts or revises written policies defining the core principles that will guide budgeting each year. The second step that Hotchkiss proposes can help avoid rigid divisions between the green eye shades and the rose-colored glasses, is to ensure that the board of trustees is adopting and revising written policies. The principles are likely to include things like fair compensation and standards of health and safety. This is another area that the board of trustees has made significant headway recently. At its April meeting, after many months of discernment and research by both the personnel committee and the board of trustees, including a congregational listening session on the topic, a policy on staff compensation was approved unanimously and enthusiastically. The policy essentially states that one, FUS will strive to align every position with the UUA's standards for staff compensation. Two, the staff leadership team will annually disclose salary numbers of every staff member to the board of trustees and the personnel committee, highlighting deviations between current pay rates and the UUA recommendations. And third, it clarifies that compensation capsules or job descriptions will be shared more broadly with the congregation at the board's discretion. The board of trustees recognizes the financial and organizational challenges that makes immediately bringing all staff to the recommended compensation levels and alignment with our new policy, both challenging and complex. However, the board personnel and finance committees agree that making significant progress in this proposed budget is the minimum we are compelled to do to align with our policies as well as our vision of ministry, which calls us to dismantle systems of oppression, which in addition to racism include sexism, ageism, classism, heteronormativity and ableism. You can read more about the board's decision in the May edition of the Madison Unitarian on our website. Two other major policy decisions that pertain to the core principles that will guide FUS's financial management moving forward, are the creation and preservation of an emergency fund as well as cash liquidity awareness. The emergency fund calls us to set aside one month's worth of operating expenses, which currently stands at approximately $150,000 with the intention of using the funds only when they are most needed at the discretion of the board of trustees. Their preservation is designed to foster a greater sense of financial security, combating what often has felt to me like a longstanding institutional story about financial scarcity. Perhaps you've found in your own financial management that it's hard to shift from saving and pursuing financial security to a place of greater generosity if you don't first define how much is enough. This policy strives to do that same type of discernment for our faith community. In a similar vein, the cash liquidity awareness policy will prompt the staff leadership team to alert the board when our unrestricted cash on hand falls below $150,000, not including the funds contained in the emergency fund. We hope doing so will allow ample opportunity for the staff, board and finance committee to in turn dialogue with the congregation about the need for an increase in income or a decrease in expenses. At the end of the third quarter of this fiscal year, we had a little over $450,000 in unrestricted funds in our bank accounts. After setting aside $150,000 for an emergency fund, we'll still have $300,000 at our disposal. So what is our faith community call to do with these funds? The opportunities are limitless and require careful mission-based discernment in alignment with our vision of ministry. It's my hope that by defining how much is enough for us to feel safe, we'll be more likely to cultivate a sense of abundance that frees us up to the creative process of aligning our resources and vision. The third step that HatchKiss proposes to help avoid rigid congregational divisions involves calling staff and ministry teams to submit annual budget proposals that are rooted in goals and initiatives that live into the vision of ministry and the budget policies. This too is something we practice this year. Staff were encouraged to first create project proposals for next year with their supervisors, ensuring they aligned with our vision of ministry and embraced the hybrid church model that we anticipate next year, which balances a mix of virtual and in-person activities when it's deemed safe for all, including the most vulnerable amongst us, to join together again face to face. The slides you see now is the cumulative result of that work. The proposed budget for the 2021-2022 church year is bursting with opportunities for nurturing a strong sense of community, dismantling racism within ourselves and our congregation and practicing adaptability as we welcome Reverend Kelly Weisman, Aspruth Jackson, and we welcome the transformational opportunities that a co-senior ministry model offers each of us. The budget also proposes that we bring all staff to the minimum amount recommended by the UUA compensation standards. Now, this is not a finish line. It is only the beginning. In numerous cases, this places beloved staff members who have given multiple decades serving you and the congregation at an entry-level salary for someone in their role. But speaking in this moment, not for all staff, only for myself, the message that is sent in making that shift towards alignment with UUA compensation standards is deeply meaningful. And it begins to mend a very real hurt that emerges upon learning that objectively speaking, you have not been compensated justly. You can see that we propose the use of $98,000 of unrestricted cash reserves, which is equivalent to the amount that we used last fiscal year in order to balance the budget. We recognize that using our cash reserves in this way is not a long-term solution. It's not sustainable, but we do hope it is a bridge to a year or two from now when the vision for our community is more clearly articulated, when we've renewed a commitment to partnerships at all levels between staff and members, minister to minister, and congregation to our denominational partners. And we can say with increased confidence that we are engaging our community more deeply with our mission. It's our hope that when we do these things that we'll see generosity and our income increase, allowing us to discontinue the use of cash reserves as a way of funding our vision of ministry. Finally, Hatchkes purports that once we've done the last three steps we've outlined, that you hold your annual stewardship campaign, communicating the vision of ministry again and again. Perhaps you've noticed that alignment in our stewardship materials this year, perhaps you've heard in the many testimonials from fellow members that this place is a home for connection for them and their families, and that their journey towards being a force for good is fueled in part by the work we do together to dismantle racism. Our active month of fundraising in March was very successful with numbers of pledges and pledge dollars exceeding that which we saw last year when we were in person. We paused our campaign in April to focus attention on calling our new minister and are excited to have jumped back into phase two of the stewardship campaign in May and June. To date, we've collected $824,000 in pledge commitments. We'll plan to continue to fundraise until we reach our pledge payment goal included in our next year's proposed budget. Thank you to so many of you in this virtual room who I know have made generous commitments for this year and beyond. You are who makes the work of this community possible. So you've heard now about the ways in which we've navigated the budget process this year leaning on the suggestions of Hotchkiss to value the dichotomous strengths of our community and root ourselves in a clear vision for the future. We've got work to do on this front, but I'm also exceedingly proud of the work this community has done in the interim period to date. Together we've achieved a tremendous amount. I've seen the community engage in transparent dialogues grappling with complex ethical dilemmas and connecting them to ourselves and to our congregation. I've seen more kindness and more radical honesty and care when folks have called each other back into covenant when relationships have needed attention. I look forward to continuing to watch the ways in which we grow together. And I hope you'll join us on Sunday, June 6th at 11 o'clock to engage in small group discussions about several of the questions which we've lifted up in this video. We'll ask you to share and hear perspectives on any of these questions shared on the screen. Thanks for tuning in today. We look forward to seeing you all again soon and in the meantime, be well. Our closing is from the late UU minister, Robert Walsh. It's called more than we deserve. I heard the second Brandenburg Concerto played in honor of Bach's 300th birthday and I was swept away. I remembered a story about the people who send messages into outer space. Someone suggested sending a piece by Bach. The reply was, but that would be bragging. Some say we get what we deserve in life, but I don't believe it. We certainly don't deserve Bach. What have I done to deserve the second Brandenburg Concerto? I have not been kind enough. I have not done enough justice. I have not loved my neighbor or myself sufficiently. I have not praised the holy enough to earn a gift like this. Life is a gift we have not earned and for which we cannot pay. There is no necessity that there be a universe, no inevitability about a world moving toward life and then self-consciousness. There might have been nothing at all. Since we have not earned Bach or Crocuses or the love of our dearest friend, the best we can do is express our gratitude for the undeserved gifts and do our share of the work of creation. Blessed be and amen.