Memorial United Methodist Church

Monthly Mission Offering Announcement
Each month Memorial collects a special offering for mission. Below please find the list of offering for 2011 and a bit of information about each organization. All checks can be made to Memorial United Methodist Church. Please write Monthly Mission Offering in the memo line and your generous gift will join others in our congregation in supporting United Methodist justice and witness ministries locally and globally.

June: Peace with Justice Sunday
The 1980 General Conference created a church wide Peace with Justice program assigned to the General Board of Church and Society. The 1984 General Conference voted to support the program with an annual Special Sunday offering on World Order Sunday, established more than half a century ago to build recognition and support for the work of the United Nations. Your gifts fund Peace with Justice ministries in your local annual conference and Peace with Justice ministries in the U.S and Globally. These funds are distributed by the General Board of Church and Society.

Please support the following appeal of the Coalition on Human Needs:

The House of Representatives approved the largest one-year reductions to human needs services in U.S. history last month.  Now Congress is struggling to decide how much of the House's extreme cuts will be adopted this year.

Human needs organizations must show an outpouring of opposition to the cuts in health care, education, housing, child care and Head Start, home energy aid, job training and employment services, and food aid for seniors now on the table.

That's why we are redoubling our efforts to get your organization to sign the SAVE for All Statement of Principles - and to encourage other groups in your network to sign too.  (Please take a look at the list of signers in your state (you may not be there yet if your group signed very recently) - please encourage groups who are not already on to sign.)

We will be sending the statement to each Member of Congress, House and Senate, during the week of March 28.  Help us make this an unprecedented response to an extreme threat.  Please sign by Friday, March 25.*
Who should sign?  Human service providers, congregations, community organizations, PTO's, businesses, advocacy groups, professional organizations, civil rights groups, policy experts, umbrella associations...

To sign, visit:  http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/125/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=5703

To read the Statement, visit: http://www.chn.org/pdf/2011/StatementwithSigners.pdf.

Extreme Cuts in the House Plan:

• 218,000 young children would not be able to receive Head Start services
• 10,000 people with long-term disabilities would lose their current rental assistance; most will be forced out of their homes
• 11 million patients would lose health care they've received at Community Health Centers (for more than 3 million, the loss of health care would be almost immediate)
• 20 million people, including 5 million children, 2.3 million seniors and 1.7 million people with disabilities, would lose some or all of the anti-poverty help now provided by community action agencies
• 9.4 million low-income college students would lose some or all of their Pell Grants
• 8 million adults and youth would lose access to job training and other employment services
• 81,000 low-income people, mostly seniors, would no longer receive supplemental food packages
• 1.2 million poor households in public housing will see their rental units deteriorate further because of cuts to maintenance and repairs; some units will no longer be habitable.
  
  That's not all.  Many thousands of jobs would be lost (for example:  10,000 teachers, 5,000 health care staff, 55,000 Head Start staff).  And the cuts would slow down the economy, threatening our fragile economic recovery, and costing hundreds of thousands of jobs, just as we've started to make some progress.  And remember:  there are far smarter ways to reduce the deficit.  A combination of fair revenue increases (examples worth many billion$:  collect more revenue now sheltered offshore, end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy) and reductions in wasteful spending (many examples in the military, as well as oil and gas industry subsidies, etc.) can reduce the deficit without hurting those most in need or threatening the economy. 

*We will continue collecting organizational names past that date - but help us make the list that gets sent to every Congressional office very large.

Hello,

I feel terribly awkward to be writing to you all again, but I've been told by several people that I did not express well enough, the desperate situation I'm currently in with the storage facility that I've been paying monthly fees for. When my long term partner and I broke up, I stored much of my clothing and other household items that I would need when I set up my next apartment. I can no longer pay this storage fee and am wringing my
hands at the thought that as of next Saturday, March 5th (I got a slight reprieve from March 1st, which is Tuesday), my belongings will go into lockdown and will be sold at an auction due to non-payment. My things HAVE to be out of there SATURDAY MORNING! I am now in my next apartment, but cannot afford to hire people to move my things here, and I am living with minimal things, clothing and other items.

I would be so grateful if anyone could help me rescue this stuff before my deadline. None of it is huge or very heavy, but there's a fair amount of it. I would even accept saving some of it, rather than having it all sold off.

My things are at Safeguard Self Storage, 85 Weymann Avenue, New Rochelle, NY. My things need to be picked up there and taken to the YWCA, 69 north Broadway, White Plains, NY. I need to stress AGAIN that