Our Love is Resilient: Feb 2026 Update from Side With Love
As we enter February and pass the halfway point of 30 Days of Love, we find ourselves navigating a moment that is both heavy and full of courage. ICE escalations across the country — and the trauma communities are carrying in places like Minneapolis — remind us how urgently our faith is needed. This season invites us once again to root ourselves in the truth that love is not passive. Love tells the truth, centers the vulnerable, and refuses to look away from suffering.
Yet this moment is also filled with resilience. Across our denomination, people are grounding themselves spiritually, gathering in community, singing songs of liberation, and taking steady, faithful action. Our teams are working to provide tools and guidance to help congregations navigate this difficult moment: resources for understanding the crisis, supporting immigrant neighbors, staying aligned with frontline leadership, and anchoring ourselves in practices that nourish courage. We also continue to offer opportunities for reflection, learning, and collective readiness as we build communities rooted in faith over fear.
You'll find updated materials, weekly guidance, and new ways to engage with this work throughout February. Our commitment remains unchanged: to accompany one another with clarity and compassion, to strengthen the spiritual backbone of our movement, and to help our communities rise to the challenges of this moment with steady, liberating love.
Read on to learn about our February offerings. Our February Gathering on the 9th lifts up stories of UU resistance and resilience while our February Green Sanctuary Community Meeting on the 18th focuses on climate justice and Green Sanctuary with kids. Our ICE Out! Week of Action is extending to 2/14 and we have more resources - including our worksheet Six Questions Congregations Need to Answer About Communtity Safety In this Moment — we hope will help you make meaningful action.
In solidarity and hope,
The Side With Love Team
The Gathering: Faith over Fear
Monday, February 9th @ 2 HT / 5 PT / 8 ET
From Maine to Minneapolis to San Francisco, we see so many stories of resistance and resilience amidst the ongoing assaults by the Trump administration.
Are you in need of hearing some stories about how Unitarian Universalists are showing up in this moment? This month’s Gathering is for you!
One year into this administration, we will lift up stories of resistance and resilience - your own, and those of SF Bay Area court watch vigils, and Maine’s “God squad” showing up between immigrants and ICE, and the UU presence at Chicago’s Broadview Detention Center. Songs for Liberation will grace us with the music they share outside Broadview and at so many other actions.
See you at The Gathering to strengthen your spirit, make sense of the threats to democracy, and take meaningful action alongside others!
If you are on staff or a board member of a congregation, we encourage you to ALSO attend Now What: The Gathering for Congregational Leaders.
ICE Out! Week of Action Extended through 2/14!
Thank you to all who have participated in our UU ICE OUT! UU Week of Action this week!
We are excited to extend it through February 14th, including:
Daily Action Hour in Zoom
Phone Blitz making an unbroken chain of calls every 3 minutes for 80 hours
Monday's Side with Love Gathering
Specifics are still being finalized so please refresh the post on 2/9 to see the new event information.
Green Sanctuary for our Kids
Wednesday, February 18 @ 1pm HT / 4pm PT / 7pm ET
Creating Climate Justice is not just for adults! Our Green Sanctuary activities can engage with our children and youth programs, and those programs can also shape our Green Sanctuary work.
Come learn from Julie Rigano, Director of Family Ministry at the UU Church at Washington Crossing in New Jersey, who will share her experiences on how the Green Sanctuary work with children and youth, especially the Climate Justice Revival materials, has enhanced programming for all. Let’s Reimagine Together —not only our future but how we get there together.
Six Questions Congregations Need to Answer About Community Safety In This Moment
Unitarian Universalist congregations have a critical role in resisting violence and protecting our communities, and UUs have a long history of showing up to resist authoritarianism, xenophobia, racism, transphobia, and other attacks on communities.
Meaningful, effective response requires us to engage in faithful, values-based risk assessment and discernment that recognizes our unique landscape and community.
This worksheet is an invitation for your congregational leadership and members to have a resourced, grounded, and accountable analysis of your congregation’s capacity to nimbly and resourcefully respond to any crisis. Expand this practice by going through this worksheet with key members of your community as an ongoing spiritual practice of discernment, renewing our commitment to mutuality and our collective thriving.
Minnesota Resource Kit
Side With Love has created a Minnesota Resource Kit to help Unitarian Universalists and allies respond with clarity, courage, and fierce love as the situation in Minneapolis and the Twin Cities evolves. This toolkit brings together trusted reporting, lists of local immigrant-justice organizations, calls to action, spiritual grounding materials, and guidance on how to understand and talk about what is happening in this moment. It is updated regularly as conditions change, new actions are called, and fresh resources become available, so we encourage you to revisit and share it widely.
30 Days of Love 2026: Love At The Center: Reimagining the World As It Could Be
Mon, Jan 19, 2026 through Mon, Feb 16, 2026
At a time when fear, violence, and extraction dominate our politics and our planet, we practice another way. We believe love is not fragile; it is fierce. It grounds our organizing, fuels our imagination, and sustains our communities. Over five weeks, we are moving through a journey from imagination to action, rooting our freedom dreams in faith and bringing them to life in our world.
Each week, we offer written reflection from Side With Love staff; a conversation with a UU theologian; a multigenerational family activity; reflection questions for journaling; a meditative body practice; and a coloring sheet connected to the weekly theme. Sign up to get an email or text when our weekly offerings are live.
