About
Umission is a community that encourages and supports you to be fully engaged in a life’s work you love: Umission.
The organization has three parts: Mentors of the Week, 52 Umission Lessons and U (you). Mentors tell their story finding a mission they love (Mentors of the Week). Lessons reveal the qualities Mentors used to become successful (52 Umission Lessons). You read about the Mentors, do the lessons and become fully engaged in a mission or life’s work you love. (Umission).
Read the Mentor stories and learn about many missions and how people found their match. Do the lessons and find your own gumption to do what you love.
Umission wants you to succeed.
Definition of Mission
Umission offers the following definition of mission: Mission is seeking, finding, and sustaining a purpose that is the epitome of fit between the well being of oneself and others. Mission encompasses all people without exception and is the presence of a life affirming, fulfilling, and active reason to be alive. No life is wasted because mission individually and collectively moves the world forward in virtue, healing, and peace. There is no better life than delighting in mission – the salutary purpose of being connected and fully alive.
Guiding Questions
Our guiding questions are these:
1. What enables people to find a mission they love?
2. What prevents people from finding a mission they love?
3. What are the effects of having a salutary mission vs. not having one?
4. Who has sought, found, and sustained a salutary mission to love? Can they mentor others, and to what effect?
5. How can a purposeless or mission-less life be reversed to one of purpose?
6. How can the pursuit of a destructive purposed mission be turned to one of a salutary mission?
Activities
Umission focuses on education and research to celebrate, investigate, and activate mission. Activities include:
Celebrate
1. Person of the Week: A weekly mentor Person of the Week program identifies and illustrates individuals who are successfully sustaining a mission. These mentors are posted/interviewed on the Umission.org website. The Person of the Week is invited to choose a Charity of the Week and Umission makes a small cash donation to that charity and in honor of the Person of the Week.
2. Charity of the Week: The Charity of the Week program identifies groups who are successfully sustaining a mission in the area of nonprofit corporations. These groups are posted on the Umission.org website and are awarded a small cash donation.
Investigate
1. Umission publishes fifty two Lessons of the Week — one for each week of the year. A three year study was instituted to discover what qualities enable a mission leader to be effective. These are the topics of the Lessons of the Week.
2. Umission helps nonprofits conduct qualitative and quantitative outcome studies for grant proposal requirements and efficacy studies.
Activate
Each Lesson of the Week includes an activity that helps individuals incorporate success based qualities into their mission.
Funding
Funding may come from these sources:
1. Donations from weekly meetings, seminars, and retreat activities.
2. Grants from charitable foundations and organizations.
3. The Umission website donation tab
4. Fund raising activities
5. Individual donation solicitation
Below: A mission in Stonington, Maine — to adorn this rock with natural found shore items.
And for your pleasure, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”
Umission wants you to succeed.