At Sunday Assembly on 2 March (Everyday Jews), we reintroduced This Much I Know: a segment where we hear from a member of the Sunday Assembly community on a topic close to their heart.
David Goldstein explained why he started coming to Sunday Assembly and shared some good news involving a grant application.
Here’s an abridged version of David’s speech.
“I heard about Sunday Assembly in 2013, its first year. I immediately liked the idea. Then I started coming along… 10 years later.
So what spurred me into coming?
2023 was the year I really started thinking that I needed something more in the structure of my life, other than family and work. There was a musical that came out that year called Subspace Rhapsody, and I was particularly struck by the song How Would That Feel, which includes the line, “It might be time to change my paradigm.”
And then came the events of the 7th of October, which left a lot of us feeling vulnerable in a way we hadn’t before.
Sunday Assembly popped back into my mind, and I thought, “Here’s a community where I can hear voices other than my own – singing voice included – and I’ve got more to gain by walking through those doors than I have to lose.”
The fact that I’ve kept coming to Sunday Assembly is a testament to how welcoming everyone’s been, and I reached the point where I wanted to give something back, so I’ve done two things.
One was to offer some ideas about Sunday Assembly’s marketing, and I’ve ended up joining the crew of marketing volunteers.
As for the other thing… Marketing’s also my day job. I’m the copywriter at an accountancy firm called BKL, which has a charitable foundation called The BKL Foundation, which allocates a percentage of BKL’s profits to good causes. The trustees are BKL employees but it operates independently of BKL. I decided to request a grant for Sunday Assembly. So I wrote an email to the Foundation explaining why Sunday Assembly was a worthy cause that fitted their criteria.
And at their February meeting, The BKL Foundation trustees decided to award Sunday Assembly a grant… of £,5000!
Thank you to The BKL Foundation, and to all of you as Sunday Assemblers for being part of something that’s worth every penny of that grant.
The thing to do now is to keep going. Make sure that if BKL check back in six months, a year, to see how it’s going, we can show them how we’ve built on that grant. You’re all part of Sunday Assembly’s marketing. So please, forward the Sunday Assembly newsletters, share the social media posts, do your own posts tagging Sunday Assembly, and keep telling people about us. Just tell them not to wait 10 years before they give it a try.
I thought about signing off today with ‘Kind regards’, but no one has ever said “Kind regards” in an actual conversation, except for the King. It’s documented: 9th of March 2021. So Instead I’ll end with the sign-off that the future Queen Mother used in 1941:
‘Tinkety-tonk, old fruit, and down with the Nazis.’”
From everyone at Sunday Assembly, thank you to The BKL Foundation for their amazing generosity!
Here’s David’s photo of Karen, our treasurer, meeting The BKL Foundation chair and some of the trustees at BKL’s North London office.
Left-right: Tyler, Karen, Roze, Ellie, Ian