President's Report: AGM 2026
by Jay Moore
Interfaith Grand River
Annual General Meeting
8 October 2026
President’s Report
This report will describe the activities of Interfaith Grand River through the past 12 months in general and, specifically, the activities of the Steering Committee during that period. The president of IGR is also the Chair of the Steering Committee and this report will reflect that fact.
The foundational activity of IGR is holding monthly meetings where participants are invited to get to know each other and develop relationships with one another from many different faith and cultural groups. Since Covid, when our face-to-face attendance dropped, we have slowly been increasing our monthly attendance and we have almost reached our normal, pre-Covid attendance. A sample of themes that have guided our discussions are listed here:
• Free speech
• “My Faith Journey” where a member speaks about their personal religious history followed by dialogue in the group
• Dealing with grief
• Dealing with death
• Our faith and our relationship to money
• Religion and how it addresses the ills of society
• Rest and rejuvenation
• Celebrating our 25 years and reviewing where we’ve come from and what we are achieving. There were about forty-five people in attendance for that meeting help in September 2026.
Here are the highlights of our activities since the last AGM held in October 2025:
1. We held our first Interfaith Thanksgiving Party in Cambridge last year. May thanks to Sandy Milne for, first of all, having the idea and, secondly, for leading the effort to make it happen.
2. We held a Members’ Meeting at Hospice Waterloo and we given a tour and excellent information about the services provided there.
3. For the second year, representatives from IGR served as leaders and teachers for the children in the Day Camp at The Lake Buddhist Monastery in Cambridge. It was called “Interfaith Day.” The children visited three houses of worship in the Cambridge area and were give information about the religion at each location.
4. The fourth annual Interfaith Service was held at Grand River Unitarian Congregation in Kitchener. The people at Grand River really look forward to the Interfaith service each year. We would like other faith congregations to host interfaith services, as well.
5. Once again, IGR had a booth at the two-day Multicultural Festival in Victoria Park in Kitchener. We are grateful for the volunteers who sign up to take a shift at our booth and have conversations with the public who attend.
6. Among the new sub-committees we have created, there is now the Social Justice Sub-committee to help us keep our focus on issues that confront the citizens in Waterloo Region. We encourage anyone in IGR to consider joining this sub-committee and, also, to consider providing leadership in these efforts.
7. In the winter of 2026, IGR hosted a “Faith and Nature Panel” held at Renison University College. Jeff Wilson, a professor at Renison, created and lead the event. We hope to do it again this winter and we hope to invite Martin Luther University College to make it a joint effort.
8. We now have an active webpage linked to our website called “Chaplaincy Resources” which was designed to serve chaplains and counsellors at hospices in the region who particularly need interfaith resources. We now realize it is an excellent resource for all social service workers who have clients with particular needs. All of the effort to create and implement this project was from Yvonne Aburrow who donated her time and talent from her company, Carnelian Web Services.
9. At a Members’ Meeting, we had a special speaker from the Regional “We All Belong Here” campaign. This is an important campaign and it is so congruent with the goals of IGR. We were happy to have Fauzia Baig as our guest.
10. The annual Interfaith Community Breakfast was a great success this year. It was held at Bingeman’s Conference Centre and well-attended. We are pleased that the relationship between the Breakfast Committee – active for over 50 years – and IGR – active for 25 years – is growing and being reinforced as we pay attention to each others’ activities and find ways to co-operate and share our goals.
11. The Steering Committee held a special meeting to understand more and to clarify possible actions to combat antisemitism. The members of the Steering Committee chose to bring greater awareness to ourselves first. We were also very aware of the need for us to be sensitive to the Muslim members of our comunity and the effects of Islamaphobia, as well.
12. We have begun the work to gain Charitable Status for IGR. We expect that it will take about a year. A law firm by the name of Gowling WLG International has offered to assist us in the final stages of the process and, for the prelimary work, three members of the Steering Committee will work on a committee along with an experienced volunteer from outside IGR and Robyn Schwarz of Dumbo Octopus Consulting who also prepared our application for a grant from the Upstream Fund (See the results below)
13. Last, but not least, our application for funding through the Upstream Fund in the Region of Waterloo was approved. We have been funded $14,000 a year for two years and we are very excited to plan the details of how we will benefit from these resources. We are very grateful to Robyn Schwarz of Dumbo Octopus Consulting for her successful preparation of the application and for her ongoing to commitment to helping us manage our financial needs currently with, for instance, reaching charitable status within the coming year and continuing to prepare future applications for ongoing grant funding. We are grateful to Robyn and look forward to working with her.
