Greening Grace Team Formed

Oops, this should have been posted a month or so ago when it was originally written. 

The Greening Grace Team is an active committee focused on our mission to enable Grace Church and parishioners to reduce our energy consumption and cost, reuse our God-given resources, and recycle. Thanks to the leadership of Jonathan and Alicia Hunt, the team now has 7 core team members and launched a 2011 planning meeting at the end of October. We meet monthly on Tuesday evenings at 8pm and are currently pursuing the following education, “greening”, and community service opportunities:

• Submitting environmentally focused grant applications for Grace Church
• Identifying topics and facilitators for the 2011 Lenten Education series
• Identifying workshops and attendees (e.g. Sustainable House of Worship (SHOW) workshop and Green Grant Gathering) to share ideas
• Posting volunteer and education opportunities on our blog: http://gracemedford.org/greeninggrace

The team submitted our first grant application for a small rain water harvesting system thanks to Catherine Smith. We also partnered with Green Medford on Halloween to participate in “Reverse Trick or Treat” to distribute energy efficient light bulbs to Medford residents.

For more information or to join the team, please speak to Jonathan or contact the team at greeninggrace@gracemedford.org or consult this blog. We welcome your ideas!
Written by Kim Jackson 
Peace!

Joyous Event Last Night with Some Green Touches

Last night we celebrated the Institution of The Reverend Noah Evans as the 18th Rector of Grace Church.  The evening was a combination of serious calls to action and fun.  As part of the planning for the celebration, the Vestry made several green choices to be better stewards of our environment that we mentioned at the end of the bulletin.

Here are the choices we made to make this wonderful celebration greener:

• Used reusable cloth table clothes instead of disposable plastic ones
• Instead of buying one time use stemware we rented glass wine glasses and champagne flutes
• The plates were made from bio-degradable and compostable sugar can fiber and held up well through out the event
• The napkins were made from 100% recycled paper
• We used our reusable metal silverware and washed it instead of disposing of box after box plasticware

For our normal Wednesdays at Grace Community Dinner we use our ceramic plates and silverware, but the size and tight timing of the event made us find alternatives that did not involve washing lots of dishes between dinner, the server and dessert.  Some of these choices made the event even more classy.  Toasting with glass flutes was much better than the alternatives.

We hope you will consider the choices you make when throwing your next event and how you can make the party greener.

Here is a short clip from the ceremony to share the fun had by all.



Peace!