Hello everyone! You are receiving this email because you expressed to us (Kyle Vath and Rob DiMartino, your co-leaders for this year) at some point that care of God's creation was something that is important to you.

On Wednesday, August 11, 2022, we proposed to the vestry of Christ Church Cathedral-Cincinnati a resolution that formally recognized the Creation Care and Environmental Justice Ministry as an official ministry of the Cathedral and the motion passed unanimously! So now we are official and we are ready to get to work!

Committees are often boring and commonly graveyards for energy, ideas, and innovation. So we are not excited about having another committee that meets and discusses topics. Rather, we hope to start a movement within our congregation and our community. Putting solar panels on our roofs is a great thing to do. But helping to open the hearts and minds of those around us to think about these kinds of things is even more important.

And so as we organize and begin this movement, we hope to group our work into three "buckets" that are aligned with The Episcopal Church's Creation Care structure:

• Loving Formation
• Liberating Advocacy
• Life-Giving Conservation

So if any of that sounds exciting and meaningful to you, we are excited to have you join this movement together...and please invite your friends to join!

The Episcopal Church has invested in a "BrightAction" platform that allows Creation Care teams like ours to join, form community, track our individual carbon emissions, and create environmental "challenges" to encourage each other in our own sustainability. It's free to us!

So, let's start by having everyone join the Christ Church Cathedral page here!

The Episcopal Church has created a Creation Care Pledge for us to complete. We encourage you to take the pledge here and then let us know you did! We'll add you to the list of people from our community who have taken the pledge.

Christ Church Cathedral is a part of Faith Communities Go Green, a collaboration between Green Umbrella and EquaSion that has the mission of partnering with religious communities to create a more sustainable and equitable future for all by mobilizing their moral voice to reduce the risk of catastrophic climate change. Their vision is for religious communities to collaborate to integrate care for creation in their lives and society.

Check out their website for their helpful resources!

The City of Cincinnati has developed "The Green Cincinnati Plan (GCP)". Updated in 2018, the Green Cincinnati Plan presents a comprehensive set of recommendations to advance the sustainability, equity, and resilience of our city. Over the coming year, a new 2023 GCP will be developed with input from many stakeholders and community members like you/us, and that process is guided by a Steering Committee, comprised of government, corporate, academic, non-profit, faith, and community organizations appointed by the Mayor. One way to engage with the process is by joining in-person and virtual feedback sessions. It would be wonderful if some from our CCEJ ministry could be at as many of these as possible.

You can view the meeting schedule by clicking here. Please email Kyle Vath if one is of interest to you and if you plan to attend so we can try to coordinate.

Faith Communities Go Green (FCGG) is partnering with Faith in Place to bring a free, local watch party of Dr. Katharine Hayhoe’s presentation at Faith in Place' annual “2022 Green Team Summit: Rooted Together”.

The Faith Communities Go Green, Education/Lifestyles Group, will be hosting an in-person watch party at EarthConnection. Those who do not wish to watch in-person can also register online and watch from home. At the conclusion of the presentation, all are welcomed to join us on a Zoom call for a brief discussion with our FCGG friends locally.

The Diocese of Southern Ohio Creation Care & Environmental Justice Task Force has a website that can be found here.

If you are interested in joining their mailing lists, please reach out to one of the leaders listed on their page.

The Diocesan Creation Care and Environmental Task Force has created a set of devotionals to be used in monthly vestry meetings. These monthly devotionals are meant to help vestries begin their meetings with a brief time of reflection and prayer that connects the current liturgical season with life on earth and the work of the vestry. Each devotional draws from the seasonal lectionary texts and track with the themes of the church year.

But we feel these devotionals are so well-done we wanted to share them with you as well. Click here to access the devotionals.

The Episcopal Church has a Creation Care website and many resources located there.

You can also read the numerous environment-related "Acts of Convention here.

If you know someone who might want to join the Creation Care movement at Christ Church Cathedral, forward them this email and have them click below and ask to be added to the mailing list. We promise to not spam you with emails and you can always unsubscribe if it gets to be too much!