UUAA 2026: Sanctuary for Hope
The “Sanctuary for Hope” 2026 Stewardship Campaign is now underway!
Read more about the campaign in the letter to the congregation below.
Have questions about pledging? Click here.
Make your pledge: Click here to make a pledge to the annual budget campaign.
Make your payments automatic: Have you already made your pledge? If so, you can click here to set up automatic donations.
Or you can download a hard copy pledge form to turn in to the UUAA office.
Thank you helping fund the remarkable combined actions the UUAA congregation. Through our shared commitment, pooled resources, and collective actions, you are making an impact on our community and our world.
Excerpts of the Letter to the UUAA Congregation sent September 30, 2025
Dear UUAA Community,
In an uncertain world that can feel overwhelming and scary, we each need places of refuge. Places where we feel
safe, supported, and seen. Places that hold the wisdom and potential of who and what we human beings can be,
at our best. Across generations, for over 160 years, UUAA has been exactly that, a Sanctuary for Hope. A
sanctuary for what we know is both better and possible.
Grounded in the strength of community, generations of UUAA congregants have shared this promise, this vision of who and what we can be, with the wider world, bringing alive our commitment to human dignity and flourishing with the most vulnerable, those forgotten or rejected by the mainstream world. Through your presence in our community, you are a part of an important legacy, one that has, in current times, taken on
renewed significance.
This year, UUAA voted to reaffirm and deepen our commitment to being a sanctuary congregation for those facing persecution or harm, climate devastation, and/or broader crisis.
We, the members of the First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor, believing in the worth and dignity of every person, do hereby reaffirm our commitment to support and protect those seeking safety from unjust persecution, including immigrants and members of the LGBTQIA+ community in Washtenaw County and beyond. We further resolve to create the infrastructure within our building so that UUAA can serve as a physical place of refuge in times of crisis.
Within our walls, hope is not just an idea, it is a living, breathing embodied promise. Through our shared values and our covenant with one another, our UUAA community grounds us and gives us the courage to show up and make a difference in ways that alone we could not. We routinely are a Sanctuary for Hope beyond our community’s walls by:
- Fighting for justice reform and honoring the dignity of incarcerated people, providing them tools for self-education, self-advocacy (including the ability to petition for freedom), and practical resettlement assistance upon release;
- Being in solidarity with immigrants and refugees and with the LGBT community; providing meals and friendship to people who are houseless and building homes for low income community members;
- Speaking out and organizing for reproductive rights, economic justice, voting rights and for democracy;
and, - Working to make our UUAA facility sustainable and self-sufficient, with our solar energy production, ground wells, and sizable campus as pillars that support UUAA’s ability to be a place of refuge for others.
We are writing to ask you to help keep the flame of hope strong and vibrant at UUAA.
90% of UUAA’s operating income comes from the annual pledge commitments made by our community’s congregants; pledging is UUAA’s single most important source of revenue. Because of this, we ask that every member, friend, and regular visitor make a pledge to UUAA, in support of our community’s work in 2026 and beyond. Please consider the amount that you will be able to donate next year and use the links above to make your pledge for 2026.
Every pledge, no matter the amount, ensures that UUAA can continue being a Sanctuary of Hope now and in the future. Just as others gave to this community and sustained it before we were here, the task now falls on each of us to nurture and sustain UUAA for generations to come – for generations that will hold a bolder, more inclusive, more love-centered sense of what humanity can be and do. Won’t you join us in ensuring that UUAA remains the Sanctuary of Hope that we all need?
In faith,
The Stewardship and Development Team: Dixie Hibner, Ed Lynn, Mary Lynn Stevens, Toni Wander, Deb Markum
