107 July 2026 - Friday after the Seventh Sunday of Pentecost

Dear friends,

Our daughter Judy couldn’t stop talking about the red sun in the sky last evening. And it was an arresting view out of our window—like the cover of a sci-fi novel. Whether you are amazed, or anxious about air quality, or feeling broader grief about climate change—you’re not alone. Please stay safe amidst the wildfire smoke—and reach out if it’s not safe for you to go out and you need groceries, or if you just want to talk.

As you know, we will be entering a new era in September as Q Studio Labs moves to a new location—and we need your help.

Reach out if you geek out about

• WiFi mesh networks?

• “Smart Home” stuff like Cameras and Smart Locks?

Next week I will share a fuller invitation and signup for late August and the first 2 weeks of September, when we’ll need help painting, refinishing floors, schlepping and organizing.

All of this work is to make our space ready to welcome the Sunnyside Literacy Lab, Citation Needed, and Parenting Style playgroups. (Read more below about them below!) These partners are all focused on empowering children to be curious, responsible, and creative. But the more profound connection is that their founders are each responding faithfully to a deep sense of call. And that reflects the deeper vision that guides these invitations to share our space and join us in shared ministry.

We are intentionally cultivating an ecosystem of community members who are pursuing their God-given vocations. Our nickname for this right now is “the Greenhouse.” We envision this ecosystem becoming an incubator in which neighbors discover their vocations, and are supported as they pilot and grow new initiatives which will contribute to the flourishing of this neighborhood. We can’t wait to see what emerges—what might be stirring in you, and how we can nurture your next faithful step.

The logistics work and manual labor that we’ll be doing over the next few months is all about nurturing those possibilities, and to live out our mission in new ways—to show this neighborhood “that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new.”

peace,
carl+

THIS LITTLE LIGHT is on summer hiatus.

As a community, we take turns giving and receiving—spending time in the spotlight, and doing work behind the scenes.

Can you help out this week? Or in the Sundays to come? Sign up here!

The Burial of Taylor John Michael Borodavka

As I wrote last week, we are grieving with our own Yvonne Borodavka: her son Taylor died July 4 after a long struggle with alcohol addiction. We trust that Taylor is at rest in God’s infinite light and love: the prodigal son, embraced with joy by his Father. We trust that Taylor is held in that peace that passes all understanding. And our hearts are broken with Yvonne, and all who love Taylor.

Taylor’s Burial Service (Fr. Carl will officiate)
Saturday, August 1st at 11:30am
St. Michael’s Cemetery
Main Office Entrance
24-20 49th Street, Astoria, NY 11103

Everyone is also invited to a Celebration of Taylor’s Life
Sunday, August 16 (Taylor’s Birthday) at 10am
Atonement Lutheran Church
30-61 87th Street, East Elmhurst, NY 11369

We are thrilled to announce three new partnerships that are grounded in our shared values of creativity, solidarity, and integrity. Come September, All Saints Church will become the new home of the Sunnyside Literacy Lab (founded by Anna Young, left), Citation Needed Press (led by Ari Wolff and Cristina Ferrigno, center), and Parenting Style playgroups (led by Janice Chou, on the right). You can learn more about our dream of an emerging ecosystem of mission-aligned initiatives here.

Registration is open for Sunnyside Literacy Labs’ fall programming, and for Print + Build, the Tuesday/Thursday art classes that we will be offering at the church for kids K-5, in partnership with Citation Needed.

If you have questions about these partnerships, or have other ideas about how to use the All Saints building as a blessing to this beautiful and diverse neighborhood, please reach out.

The Peer Support Group, organized through Sunnyside-Woodside Mutual Aid, aims to restore the rightful place of community care. In a culture dominated by the shallow preeminence of self care -- which neglects our responsibilities to each other and frames individual wellbeing as a solitary responsibility & pursuit -- this group insists that that we cannot successfully self care our way out of or through polycrisis, and that healing & care must come from the collective for the collective.

The next meeting is scheduled for July 21st. Reach out to Zehra for more info!

Looking for ways to protect our neighbors from ICE?

The neighborhood ICE Watch “Office Hours” meets every Saturday from 2-3 pm in the sanctuary. This is a great way to get connected to the work of protecting our neighbors and building power. All are welcome.

Cristina Ferrigno
Tabula Rasa

Cristina Ferrigno is a Colombian-born, Brooklyn-raised artist based in Sunnyside. Her work explores cultural “in-betweenness” as a transnational adoptee through combined-media practices and ongoing community-based projects. She loves all kinds of prints and printmaking, photography and image-making processes, as well as working with personal and visual archives.

This work grew out of experiments using leftover paper pulp from an intergenerational workshop she led in the church garden in August 2025. This lovely, messy, hot event was an epic collaboration between the Episcopal Mission in Sunnyside and Citation Needed, a community-based press and workshop series where Cristina has served as Studio Director since 2025. So this work invites the question…

What's something you’re working on that feels like a soggy, smelly mess?

Here is a tender response we’ve received this week:

I started a knitting project during the winter that I never finished. Staying inside because of the wildfire smoke in the air, I tried to pick it back up again—but I’ve made so many mistakes getting back into it. Maybe not soggy and smelly, but definitely all tangled up.

Let us know what YOU think on the Little Window Gallery website! We’ll anonymously post all the responses there, and on the LWG’s Instagram page. And in a few weeks we’ll randomly select one of the people who responded and they’ll get to keep a print of Cristina’s paper pulp poem—a local work of art for their very own!

Thanks to Cristina for sharing this tender reflection on grief—and for sharing her practice with us in so many ways, and in ways yet to come!

Please—if you're yearning for something that you haven't seen here, reach out start a conversation. This new mission in Sunnyside is made up of...US. So it gets to be what we want it to be...