November updates from the Board and your Board President

Dear Friends and Members of WHUUF,
Another eventful month is behind us here at WHUUF, and it has been incredibly exciting to see our community pull together to achieve some major goals. Your energy and dedication have been nothing short of awesome.

Our Social Justice Committee hit a massive milestone this month. Team members were a fixture during coffee hour, relentlessly rallying volunteers to send out letters to voters in North Carolina. Thanks to your collective dedication, over 2,000 handwritten letters were signed, sealed, and sent out to encourage voter turnout in this critical election. A huge thank you goes out to John Riles and the Social Justice team for leading the charge, and to every single person who picked up a pen to support this effort.

Closer to home, the Oregon general election deadline is Tuesday, November 3. While I know the WHUUF community never misses a chance to make its voice heard, consider this your friendly reminder to get your ballots into an official drop box on or before Election Day!

And then there was WHUUF’s largest fundraiser of the year: our annual online auction! Thanks to the incredible generosity of everyone who donated items, experiences, and events, our catalog featured a spectacular 177 unique donations. This translated into roughly 250 winning opportunities, spanning cozy dinners, exciting community activities, and even premier resort and beach house vacations.
Because of your immense generosity, we raised over $22,000 for WHUUF’s operating budget—shattering our $18,000 fundraising goal by a mile! A huge thank you goes out to everyone who donated items, tracked the catalog, and kept the bidding competitive right up until the final second. We also owe a deep debt of gratitude to our hardworking Auction Committee for assembling a gorgeous catalog and ensuring a seamless, flawless bidding process from start to finish.

The spectacular conclusion to the auction was our grand finale celebration event, which made history as the largest WHUUF gathering ever, with 120 tickets sold! Because we have officially outgrown our own space (at least for now!), we moved the festivities over to the Multnomah Arts Center. The Auction Committee knocked it out of the park with a fantastic food spread from Tito’s Taquitos, perfectly paired with refreshing drinks and lively entertainment. Our very own Betsy Weston set a beautiful mood with elegant background piano music during dinner. Afterward, the Pyrettes, fan favorites from the West Hills Coffeehouse, took the stage and brought incredible energy to the room, even getting people dancing in the aisles. It was truly the perfect, joyful finale to an unforgettable auction season.

Now, we enter a quieter season of the year—but that doesn’t mean momentum is slowing down at WHUUF. We are all eagerly awaiting the results of our financial feasibility study, which concluded last month. Early this month, we will share the detailed findings with you. These insights will clarify what we can realistically achieve through a capital campaign and help shape the final design of our building expansion.
If your incredible energy at the auction, the celebration event, and in our recent letter-writing efforts is any indication, we are well on our way to a vibrant future. Together, we are building a space where we can welcome more people into our sanctuary and host large celebrations right here within our own walls.

I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with warmth, family, and friends.
Uwe Neitzel
President, Board of Trustees