I am happy to announce the arrival this month of an Our Whole Lives (OWL) program to our community. UUFS is collaborating with the UU Fellowship of Los Gatos to bring comprehensive sexuality education to area children. The UUA developed the OWL curriculum in conjunction with the United Church of Christ (UCC) denomination 25 years ago. This nationwide cooperative organization continually updates materials and rigorously trains its facilitators, and I am proud to count myself now among them, along with a volunteer from the Los Gatos congregation who also trained and will work with me. Thanks go to Corinne Blankenship and Rev. Johnnie at UUFS for helping to administer the new OWL program. Meetings will alternate between UUFS and UUFLG. The inaugural session is designed for first and second graders and will run from March 10 through May 19, preceded by a parent information meeting on March 3. Find out more about the UUA’s take on the role of lifespan sexuality education in Unitarian Universalism here and plan to join us on March 3 in the UUFS Conference Room. As children grow, OWL can support them through their changes with interpersonal skills, relationship building, and self-acceptance.

How fitting that OWL will begin during March as we consider the theme of transformation, another of the values expressed in the UUA’s proposed new statement of purpose called Article II. Activities in the children’s Sunday Morning Program will change everything from refuse into soil, one color into another, solid into liquid, and seeds into grass. We’ll experiment with how to switch our focus and even transform eggs–an ancient symbol for the start of something new–into beautiful decorations for the Easter brunch at the end of the month.

As the Article II draft puts it, “openness to change is fundamental to our Unitarian and Universalist heritages.” We’ll sure be getting lots of practice with transformation in RE at UUFS this month.