Dear St. Vladimirians,
We want to let you know that each of the parish council members has made their donation towards the $800,000 we are aiming to raise for our building project. We know that we are asking a lot of our parish families and singles to find $10,000 or more to contribute to the Building Fund. And we didn’t feel comfortable encouraging you to do that UNTIL WE HAD DONE SO OURSELVES. We are trying to lead by example. No one knows who gave what except our Treasurer, Mikhail. And he informed us that our average donation came out to $14,269 per parish council member. We tell you that not to brag, but to challenge you to meet or beat what we have done. Because time is of the essence. And this is not supposed to be easy! It is HARD to build a new church (Bishop Michael just told us that at our feast day on Tuesday!) – and we need to embrace that spiritual reality and ask the Lord to bless our labors! We greatly strengthen our parish family bonds by succeeding at hard things together – and this is one of the hardest things we will ever do together as a parish family.
We know that for some people finding $10,000 is a real challenge. While for others, it may be possible to exceed that. Our cash on hand is up from $380,000 to $658,559 as of today – this is happening with your help!
Why do we need to raise $800,000 now? The math can be found here – and if you haven’t read this post from the Parish Council we strongly encourage you to do so (we updated this to outline how young folks can help too – EVERYONE can do their part!).
If you don’t want to go to that posting, in short:
- TOTAL COST OF PROJECT 2026: $2,400,000
- CASH ON HAND (UPDATED): $658,559
- LOAN WE CAN AFFORD: $1,200,000
- NEED TO RAISE IN CASH (UPDATED): $541,441
We have talked to many of you – pretty much every parishioner – about the construction project. A clear and consistent theme has come from every one of these discussions: we must build this year. We agree! And the main reason we are asking you to give $10,000 is so we can BUILD THIS YEAR.
If we do not meet our $800,000 goal (which is now only $541,441) then we will begin the project in any case, but we will have to build what we can with the cash on hand. That means that we will have to come to you MANY MORE TIMES asking for money to build, because we will not have enough to build everything in one go. It will take us a very long time to build using this approach. And we know you will hate lots of requests for funds. And we will hate asking.
We think that it is better to ask you NOW – AND GOD WILLING JUST ONCE – to help us meet this important goal. We hope you will agree. We feel that growth associated with the new church plus continued tithing will help us finish the hall (if that doesn’t make sense to you – read the post at the link above). And undoubtedly there will be some other financial needs as we progress, so we are not promising to never ask for financial support ever again, but this is the big ask. AND WE NEED EVERYONE ON THE TEAM TO GET US TO THE FINISH LINE!
Bishop Spyridon will bless the ground on August 30. We will then have a ceremonial ground breaking. CONSTRUCTION BEGINS AUGUST 31 (pending building permits, which we are already working on).
WE WOULD LOVE TO BE ABLE TO SAY THAT WE HAVE GATHERED ALL NECESSARY FUNDS WHEN BISHOP SPYRIDON VISITS!
So if you have not given yet it is not too late!
Thank you for your consideration. We are very open to questions in this regard. Please reach out to Fr. Gregory (ogrisha@stvladimiraami.org) or our Starosta Brendan (starosta@stvladimiraami.org), or our Treasurer Mikhail (treasurer@stvladimiraami.org) at any time. If we don’t know the answer we won’t make one up. :) We’ll find out and get back to you ASAP.
Fr. Gregory, Brendan + All Parish Council Members
