Whew! What a Month!

Greetings everyone,

It's been a while since we've written an update, mostly because we opened the new GlobalServe Co-op, and were waiting for internet to get connected. As of tonight, we're back on line and time to catch up.

The Tribune and Hyde Park Herald articles went over extremely well and have generated a lot of excitement about our project to purchase the monastery. We're starting a letter-writing campaign locally to raise the down payment, and the North American Students of Cooperation www.nasco.org is going to help us arrange the financing for a major portion of it. So, things are getting pretty exciting...

In other news, our FaithAlive interfaith visiting program is up and running with the efforts of Heather Remaly and Rachel Minnaar, and our first congregational visit is this weekend. Some professors are offering credit to students for participating--exactly the kind of cooperation we're hoping for. If you'd like to know more, you can contact the coordinators at faithalive@seminaryaction.org.

This weekend we're having our Seminary Student Leadership Event, which will bring together a few dozen students from seminaries in Chicago to network and prepare for the year ahead. Lots of last-minute registrations, but actually this is pretty exciting. We have speakers coming from Interfaith Youth Core, Interfaith Worker Justice, Urban CPE, Inc., SCUPE, and the LGBTQ studies center.

The last update is regarding GlobalServe, which we started as a 'practice project,' an interfaith cooperative community where members commit to volunteer service as part of their student or working lives. Well, we filled one house, and now two, and are trying to handle the logistics for perhaps four more apartments! The interest has been incredible, and rather than turning some 20 people away, it made sense to at least try to expand, and to create it in such a way that each apartment could operate on its own within a larger network.