By mark hicks gail forsyth-vail, developmental editor

Invite participants to complete a Final Evaluation and distribute handouts and pens/pencils.

Ask permission to share the evaluations with UUA staff in order to help advance understanding of how this program works in various Unitarian Universalist settings and how it might be revised and improved.

Closing (5 minutes)

Materials for Activity

• 
  Leader Resource 2, The Shaking of the Foundations (included in this document)
  
• 
  Taking It Home
  

• 
  Print out Leader Resource 2, The Shaking of the Foundations, and prepare to read it aloud.
  
• 
  Download and adapt Taking It Home. Copy it for all participants or plan to email it to the group.
  

Distribute Taking It Home. Share Leader Resource 2, The Shaking of the Foundations.

Thank participants for their investment in the program. Extinguish the chalice.

Leader Reflection and Planning

Take a few moments to read the evaluations and discuss them with your co-facilitators.

Write a letter to yourself or to a friend describing the actions and role you would like to play in deepening the congregation's commitment to being an antiracist/multicultural faith community.

Check in periodically with members of your workshop group and hold each other accountable to the commitments you made to your action plans. Find ways to honor and appreciate the changes you observe in each other and in the congregation going forward.

Alternate Activity 1: Your Gift to Me, Version Two (45 minutes)

Materials for Activity

• 
  Newsprint, markers, and tape
  
• 
  Lined paper and pens/pencils
  
• 
  Small brown paper bags — one for each participant
  
• 
  Optional: Group photo
  

• 
  Read Activity 1, Alternate Activity 1, and Alternate Activity 2. Choose one of these activities to guide participants in expressing gratitude.
  
• 
  Write a participant's name on each bag.
  
• 
  Tear or cut the lined paper into four inch squares. Make enough for each participant to write an individual note to each of the others.
  
• 
  Write on newsprint, and post:
  
  • 
    [Name], over the course of Building the World We Dream About, I have learned from you...
    
  • 
    [Name], I really appreciated the way you...
    
  • 
    [Name], your gift to the group has been...
    
• 
  Optional: Make copies of the group photo taken during Workshop 22.
  

Distribute paper so each participant has enough squares to write a note to every other participant. Call out the name of a participant, and invite other participants to express their appreciation by completing one of the posted sentences or using their own words. Pass around the bag with that participant's name on it and invite the others to place their notes in the bag. Repeat the process for each of the participants.

Then, give the bags to the participants to take home to read in private. Suggest they keep these as reminders of this program.

Distribute group photos, if you have them.

• 
  Newsprint, markers, and tape
  
• 
  An object to pass (e.g., a stone, talking stick, kaleidoscope)
  
• 
  Optional: Group photo
  

• 
  Read Activity 1, Alternate Activity 1, and Alternate Activity 2. Choose one of these activities to guide participants in expressing gratitude.
  
• 
  Write on newsprint and post:
  
  • 
    [Name], over the course of the program, I have learned from you...
    
  • 
    [Name], I really appreciated the way you...
    
  • 
    [Name], your gift to the group has been...
    
• 
  Optional: Make copies of the group photo taken during Workshop 22.
  

Invite a participant to hold the object to signal they will be the focus of the group's attention. Ask participants to hold silence until they are moved to express their appreciation for the person holding the object, using their own words or completing the posted sentences. When all who wish have spoken, invite a second person to hold the object and repeat the process. Repeat until all participants have been the focus.

Distribute group photos, if you have them.

Handout 1: Final Evaluation

Which activities, experiences, models, and methods in Building the World We Dream About helped you stretch or deepened your understanding of race and equity?

Please describe a particular activity that was successful in helping you learn.

Please describe an activity that was less effective for you or disappointed you.

What did you learn about how race, ethnicity, power, and privilege play out in your congregation and world?

How did the program shift your approach to thinking about and doing antiracist/multicultural work?

What do you consider the greatest challenges of doing antiracist/multicultural work?

If you were to write a letter to a mentor or friend about this experience, what would you say?

Excerpted from Tomorrow's Child: Imagination, Creativity, and the Rebirth of Culture by Rubem A. Alves (New York; Harper & Row, 1972).

What is hope?

It is the presentiment that imagination is more real and reality is less real that it looks. It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress us is not the last word. It is the suspicion that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe. That the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual; and in a miraculous and unexplained way life is opening up creative events which will open the way to freedom and resurrection...

[... — but t]he two, suffering and hope must live from each other.

Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair. [...But, h]ope without suffering creates illusions, naivete, and drunkenness.

[So l]et us plant dates, even though we who plant them will never eat them.

... We must live by the love of what we will never see. That is the secret discipline. It is the refusal to let our creative act be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience and it is a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren. Such disciplined hope is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints, the courage to die for the future they envisaged. They made their own bodies the seed of their highest hope....

From The Shaking of the Foundations by Paul Tillich.

Sometimes... it is as though a voice were saying: You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much.

... in the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in others and to ourselves. We experience the grace of being able to look frankly into the eyes of another, the miraculous grace of reunion of life with life. With experience the grace of understanding each other's words. We understand not merely the literal meaning of the words, but also that which lies behind them, even when they are harsh or angry... we experience the grace of being able to attempt the life of another, even if it be hostile and harmful to us, for, through grace, we know that it belongs to the same Ground to which we belong, and by which we have been accepted. We experience grace which is able to overcome the tragic separation of the sexes, of the generations, of the nations, of the races, and even the utter strangeness between humans and nature. Sometimes grace appears in all these separations to reunite us with those to whom we belong.

For life belongs to life.

And in the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relations to ourselves... because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we... We cannot force ourselves to accept ourselves. We cannot complete anyone to accept himself [sic]. But sometimes it happens that we receive the power to say "yes" to ourselves, that peace enters into us and makes us whole, that self-hate and self-contempt disappear, and that our self is reunited with itself. Then we can say that grace has come upon us.

The UUA Multicultural Growth & Witness staff group offers resources, curricula, trainings, and tools to help Unitarian Universalist congregations and leaders engage in the work of antiracism, antioppression, and multiculturalism. Visit www.uua.org/multicultural (at www.uua.org/multicultural) or email multicultural @ uua.org (at mailto:multicultural@uua.org) to learn more.