United Church Women (UCW)

ABOUT

The United Church Women (UCW) mission is to love God; foster Christian commitment, faithfulness, and spirituality; and promote respect and love for all God’s creation.

The UCW was created as the successor to the Woman’s Missionary Society, and was formed under the umbrella of the United Church of Canada structure.  With the recent changes to the church structure, our Regional Council formed a UCW Executive in April 2019 allowing us two places at the National UCW and two votes on any items at that level.  We do continue to support informally the friendships that were created in the former Montreal-Ottawa Conference. We are trying to collect information about the groups in this regional council so we can keep in touch with as many as possible. In order to be added to the contact list, please contact Valerie Nickson. 

We held an event in October of 2019 called Thanks-Living, a one-day event attended by 22 people, including two from the Eastern Ontario Outaouais Regional Council. On this day we had speakers from Montreal City Mission to tell us about the work they do. We had hoped to have two events like this each year, but this year will be a little different with the current pandemic…however, if you are interested in hosting such an event, please let us know.

The National UCW (NUCW) is very active across Canada from coast to coast. There are 1026 units across Canada and membership in 2018 was 17,280 of which 112 women have answered the call to become Licensed Lay Worship Leaders in our churches. In 2018, 545 Units donated $2,312,489.00 to their local churches and $1,133,000.00 was donated to Mission and Service. In 2012, for the 50th Anniversary of our organization, a special project was to support the Morogoro Women’s Training Centre in Tanzania and more than $268,000.00 was raised to train more than 600 women in maternity health care.  In September 2018, the NUCW adopted a global project Women for change in Zambia.  This project can be found in the 2019 Gifts with Vision Catalogue; www.giftswithvision.ca/products/keep-girls-in-school. This project will end at the UCW’s 60th Anniversary Celebration in Sydney, Nova Scotia in July 2022. We hope to be able to have people attending this Anniversary and would love to have a banner representing our regional council, so if you have the ability or are creative we would be very happy to hear from you.

Below is a list of your UCW Regional Executive; if you have any questions or comments please feel free to send an email to any of us and we will be glad to answer you.

UCW EXECUTIVE (as elected April 23, 2019)

• President: Valerie Nickson
• Vice- President: Janice Knowles                
• Secretary: Sharon Moore                
• Treasurer: Patricia Hurley
• Members at Large:
  • Shirley Stark
  • Carolyn Linde
  • Lynda Scardocchio 

Blessings on all!
– Valerie

Learn more: https://www.united-church.ca/community-faith/being-community/united-church-women-ucw
or contact Valerie Epps-Nickson