In May 2020, during the pandemic, we had a Zoom Parish Town Hall meeting. It was really well attended given the circumstances (100+ participants in attendance). It was proposed that we focused in improving some main areas:
Pastoral — Spiritual Life of the Parish
The pandemic didn’t give us too much room to work on this. We were very limited on the activities we could offer. Nevertheless, we were able to strengthen our unity as a Parish as we all came to worship together initially on Zoom and later in 1 site. Now that we are back to our 3 sites, at least we know each other a little bit better, and I think that we developed a stronger sense of unity — 1 Parish.
One great small. but huge, thing that came out during this time was our Adoration to the Blessed Sacrament. It is beautiful to see how every day since this started, people stop to visit our Lord. Either for short visits, or to stay for a longer time to pray in the presence of our Lord.
Now as we are being able to work on re-staffing our Parish, we are hoping to be able to bring back our pre-pandemic activities and new ones to strengthen our Parish life.
We are pleased to share that we have already offered 2 full-time positions and they were accepted (Youth and Young Adults Director & Liturgy and Music Director). We are working on the pre-hire process and once this is completed, we will be able to formally announce their names.
We adjusted our Mass schedule to be able to better serve our Faith Formation programs and also offer weekly Mass for the SESS parents during drop off hours.
We will work in improving our web-page and we already have a great volunteer who offered support to work on this.
During this year, we welcomed many new volunteers that brought incredible gifts to our Parish. Thank you for your time and talent!
Finances
We continued reducing some leakage in our expenses (we started that in 2018). We significantly improved our lease for the OLR school and we are working on more income opportunities. More information to be shared soon.
Thanks to your on-going generosity, we did very well during the pandemic, and we were able to sustain our Parish. Also, we were able offer some extraordinary help to Our Lady of Refuge Parish in San Jose (thanks to your donations and reduced expenses) during these very difficult times. Thank you so much.
We are working right now in closing the books for the 2020-21 fiscal year and we are looking forward to sharing the final annual report with all of you. Our Finance Board meets every 3rd Wednesday of the month. They are a group of 6 parishioners that help the Parish by overseeing the transparency of our finances and good use of our resources.
Maintenance and Better Use of Our Facilities
We were able to make incredible progress in this area despite of the pandemic. I thank all the Building and Equipment Maintenance Board members for your amazing job. Also, thank you to some new volunteers that contributed greatly in this and the Finance areas.
Complete exterior restauration of STA Church thanks to a very generous bequest that our Parish had available; restricted to the maintenance of this Church.
2 completed phases of interior renovation of our Parish offices. We were able to renovate the lobby and one interior-main corridor area. Very soon, we will continue with more work in the Pastoral Center for the enjoyment of you all.
We successfully did termites treatment to the OLR Church.
We completed mold remediation to the Dermody Center.
We made some needed clean ups in many of the sites, disposing of lots of unnecessary stored things creating new opportunities for our Parish.
There is a $3M/2-year project going on to completely renovate the Dermody Center. We are really excited about this.
SESS is doing a great job in building a new outdoors shade structure for the children. They took care of all the fundraising for this project and it is already taking place. Thank you SESS staff for your great job.
Upcoming maintenance projects: SESS roof re-coating Thomas House roof replacement SESS windows replacement (1st and 7th grades) OLR school termites inspection and interior painting
Once more, thank you all. The focus is CHRIST and we are in this together.