[ad_1]
Woods Memorial Presbyterian Church is among the 5 nationwide Interfaith Energy & Gentle (IPL) 2021 Cool Congregations Problem winners. The annual contest accepts purposes from spiritual congregations round america which might be doing work to handle international warming by lowering their carbon footprint as they create fashions of sustainability inside their communities.
Woods Memorial Presbyterian Church gained a Cool Congregations Sacred Grounds Award for its collaborative effort to revive the four-acre habitat its church campus is constructed on.
The congregation labored with the Baywise group to guage the administration of the church grounds to grow to be higher stewards of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. A volunteer county Grasp Watershed Steward drew up a plan to rework the property to a habitat that might help pollinators and wildlife, sequester carbon and mitigate stormwater.
They started by diminishing the dimensions of the garden, tremendously lowering using fertilizer and water, and planting over 500 native vegetation and over 200 native timber. They drastically diminished runoff, and have seen butterflies and native bees on the flowering shrubs within the spring, toads, skinks and pollinators all summer season lengthy, and migrating birds and butterflies at nectar sources and berry producing shrubs within the fall.
The congregation believes the most important success has been the involvement of so many teams of church and group members working collectively for habitat restoration. They acquired grants from Unity Gardens, the Chesapeake Bay Belief, and labored with the county Watershed Stewards Academy and Tree Trooper applications. A few of the many volunteer teams have been the Maryland Grasp Gardeners, Baywise, the Retired Handyperson group (rehabbers) on the church and the native highschool environmental membership and honor society. Woods Memorial is becoming a member of with different congregations throughout Anne Arundel County to look after the watersheds they share by means of the One Water Partnership, a program of Interfaith Companions for the Chesapeake, with Watershed Stewards Academy and Interfaith Energy & Gentle.
Woods Church has additionally engaged in a capital marketing campaign known as Renew to considerably scale back its power utilization by means of upgrades to all LED lighting, ultra-high effectivity HVAC methods and constructing insulation enhancements.
“Our congregation is honored to be acknowledged for our environmental work,” stated the Rev. Susan DeWyngaert, the senior pastor at Woods. “As a Presbyterian Church (USA) Earth Care Congregation, we now have made a dedication to work towards sustainability by offering worship, training, prayer and repair alternatives in our church and group. Receiving the Cool Congregations Problem Award is thrilling for us. We hope it should mannequin and encourage extra emphasis on sustainability as a religion follow.”
Rev. Susan Hendershot, president of Interfaith Energy & Gentle, stated Woods and the 4 different nationwide winners are “casting a imaginative and prescient for the form of world wherein they need to stay, after which finishing up that imaginative and prescient with sensible actions that make an actual distinction in creating lasting options to local weather change.”
[ad_2]
Source link
