Dear Sacred Ground facilitators and organizers, 

We hope you had soulful Holy Week and Easter. In our previous email (4/4) we said we would let you know this week the exact day/days when curricular changes and other edits would be made to the Sacred Ground webpages. We can now report that those edits will be made this Thursday, April 21 to Monday, April 25.

A public affairs release from the communications department of The Episcopal Church is targeted for Tuesday, April 26 to share the news with the wider church – of the release of the evaluation report, of updates to the curriculum, and earlier news we’ve previously shared internally with you re: expanded licensing for use of the curriculum beyond The Episcopal Church, the “We Bless You” video produced with UBE, and the completion of the Deeper Dive lists.

We will post that press release here on the Sacred Ground News page, and send it to the facilitators’ email list, by way of notifying you that all the web edits are indeed complete. We know how important that is since many of you are in the midst of leading circles and want to know exactly which homework assignments are changing.

Two other things we will do to help things go smoothly: 

• In cases where homework materials for a particular session are being swapped out with something new, we will place the old materials at the bottom of their respective session pages and leave them there for two months to ease the transition (especially in case it’s too short notice to ask participants to change homework for their next session). We will not, however, leave the references to those materials in the “themes” section. It’s advisable to alert participants to both of the above. 
• So that you can quickly ascertain what materials are changing we will post on Friday an up-to-date list of those changes. You will find that document on a new green button/page we are creating called “More for Facilitators” in the password-protected pages.

In addition to substituting/adding new homework materials, our Thursday to Monday web changes will also include: 

• Edits to the “Session themes and overview” sections to offer Katrina’s reflections on the new materials; 
• A new Session 11 on taking action (and revisions to Session 10) written by Canon Stephanie Spellers (note: this new session is relevant not just to current circles, but to circles that have finished and may wish to reconvene); 
• The new “More for Facilitators” page with info on facilitator webinars and other resources (including some relocated items); 
• Posting of the evaluation report by Indígena Consulting (in “More for Facilitators”). 

WEBINAR

To hear highlights from the evaluation report and for a walk-through of the curricular and other web page changes outlined above, please register for the next webinar if you haven’t already!  We will be joined by evaluator Christina Pacheco, the Very Rev. Kim Coleman and the Rev. Valerie Mayo from the Union of Black Episcopalians who were central to all these efforts, and Canon Spellers. The webinar is taking place Friday, April 29, noon-1:30 p.m. ET (11 a.m. CT, 10 a.m. MT, 9 a.m. PT, 8 a.m. Alaska, 6 a.m. Hawaii). Register for 4/29 Webinar

We encourage you to check out the evaluation report and the curricular changes in advance so you can come with your questions and observations. Many of you participated in the evaluation surveys and focus groups, so we are so glad to be sharing those results with you now.We look forward to being in conversation with you about all of the above!

The Sacred Ground Team