UUA Board of Trustees

Tom Loughery

Tom Loughrey, UUA Trustee

For well over a year the Board has been asked to consider locating our administrative offices to a different location. The current motivation originated with a possibility of a purchase of Hebrew College in nearby Newton over a year ago. While the prospects were interesting the Board wanted to see how all this might ultimately fit in a facilities strategic plan that is aligned with our Ends. Possibilities included another Boston area location, an altogether new location elsewhere in the country, leased space and more.

After much discussion and hearing information from staff on costs to move, staff disruption, revenue potential from a sale and more the Board voiced support for plans of the staff to look for adequate space in Boston near public transportation. We did not feel a need to vote on this as current policy gives the president the ability to explore these possibilities now. A Board decision would come with any motion to buy and/or sell property. Nonetheless, support is important in the process. Our policies call for a rationale and metrics that are consistent with the policies. These will guide the work of the staff as they engage in a process to seek both suitable space and a qualified buyer of our Beacon Hill property. They will also guide the Board in any ultimate decisions to approve a sale and a purchase or lease. read more »

Rev. Sarah Stewart

Rev. Sarah Stewart, UUA Trustee

Little kids and youth in bright t-shirts stood in a circle in the open, inviting parish hall in Roxbury. They were invited to share their favorite thing they had done during the day camp offered during school vacation week. The children answered: games, making friends, playing football. As one girl spoke in a quiet voice, she pulled the arm of her teen counselor around her shoulder. The youth smiled at her and encouraged her to speak more loudly, to share her voice with the group.

This school vacation camp is just one program offered by the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry (UUUM), housed at the First Church in Roxbury. Members of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Board of Trustees visited UUUM before our April board meeting to learn more about their programs.

The vacation week camp is part of UUUM’s Roxbury Youth Programs, offering an after-school program for middle- and high-school youth, weekend activities for elementary-school children, and summer employment and camp opportunities for children and youth. UUUM also offers Renewal House, a domestic violence shelter and resource program for women and men; and United Souls, a support group and network for urban men, including those transitioning home from prison.

In all these programs, UUUM relies on volunteers, many of whom are members in Boston-area Unitarian Universalist congregations. The Ministry is rigorous in screening and integrating volunteers. UU volunteers provide weeknight dinners for the Roxbury Youth Program. The counselors in the vacation week camp were drawn half from UU congregations and half from students in the Roxbury Youth Program. read more »

Rev. Dr. Michael Tino

Rev. Dr. Michael Tino, UUA Trustee

In 2010, the General Assembly directed the UUA Board to create a different kind of General Assembly for 2012.  This “Justice GA” was to be planned in accountable relationship with partner organizations who had invited us to Arizona as part of their ongoing struggle for human rights and equality.

When our Association’s Arizona Immigration Ministry met with our partners, we received one clear request for an agenda item at GA2012.  Our partners said that the single most important piece of business we could do at GA2012 was to study and repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery and support the full implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.  Further, they asked us to have our congregations study this issue and how it is related to the ongoing oppression of indigenous peoples whose lands straddle the US-Mexico border.

Given that the charge from our congregations was accountability, the UUA Board felt it imperative that we honor their request and take up this piece of business at GA2012.  Given that we are prohibited from making justice statements through Business Resolutions and that Actions of Immediate Witness are not on the GA2012 agenda, our only option was to craft a Responsive Resolution to our own report. read more »

Rev. Susan Ritchie, Lew Phinney, and John Hawkins
Writing for the UUA Board of Trustees

Last year, the UUA Board Trustees unanimously approved a motion calling for a transformation in UUA governance.  They noted that five task forces in the recent past have all reported hearing the same thing from the members of our congregations: that our governance is too complex, and needs to be more truly representative.  So, at its April meeting this year, the UUA Board voted to recommend two sets of bylaw changes to General Assembly, aimed at making the governance process less complex and strengthening the association’s commitment to democratic processes.  These bylaws changes would take effect at the end of the 2013 General Assembly. read more »

My heart changed.  When I crossed the border and saw the wall dividing us and heard the stories and felt the truth in my bones, my heart changed.   The trustees below and President Morales have described the stories and experiences  eloquently.

That trip was a powerful experience for me in understanding the human and inhuman consequences of our immigration policies and our complicity in creating the circumstances that have brought us all to this place.   Until the Jesuit sister showed me the pictures, I really did not understand the desperate poverty that drives migrants to make their journey over the fence and through the desert.  Until I met the mothers and children I did not fully understand the inhumanity of our immigration policies, the families separated intentionally, the thousands of people who have died in the Arizona desert as a result of strategic “funneling” of migrants, and the senseless incarceration and abuse of migrants.  I thought I was fairly savvy – after all, two of my grandchildren have an undocumented Mexican father – but I just did not understand how much has changed in the last ten years.  I did not expect the meanness.   My heart changed.  No longer can I view “the immigration issue” as something academic to be studied and “tackled.”  People are suffering and we must make it stop. read more »

Three weeks ago I flew to Phoenix and then drove to Tucson with about half of the UUA Board of Trustees, including UUA President Peter Morales and UUA Moderator Gini Courter. On Monday, in company with about 40 UUs, I crossed the border into Nogales, Sonora, and spent the day with groups that provide services to recently deported migrants: food, clothes, medical supplies, transportation back to their homes. On Tuesday, 6 of us returned to serve meals and visit a women’s shelter in Nogales, while the rest met with groups that work with migrants in Tucson. We had a chance to talk with migrants who had been recently deported, to understand why they try to cross into the U.S. repeatedly through the hostile Sonoran desert and mountains, often at the cost of their lives. All of them say the same thing, that they come not for themselves but for the survival of their families.

On Wednesday we returned to Phoenix for our Board meeting, from Wednesday night through Sunday morning. About half that time was spent with allies who work with migrants and Hispanic communities. We learned about the U.S. immigration system: how economic conditions in Mexico have been affected by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), largely destroying the native agricultural industry in Mexico; how migrants have been funneled into the most hostile stretch of the U.S. border in a policy known as “attrition through enforcement”; how migrants are arrested without due process and held in private prisons; how border patrol activities destroy the fabric of communities for citizens and non-citizens; and how deported families are split up and returned to different locations along the Mexican border, without identification, money, or medications. We learned about the work that needs to be done, from voter registration to political action to building support systems for those affected by deportation – including children who are U.S. citizens but whose parents have been deported. We learned that this is not a political debate, but a human rights issue. read more »

On Monday, January 18, 14 members of the UUA Board of Trustees will walk across the border with other UUs and members of the group No Mas Muertes (No More Deaths, a ministry of the UU Congregation of Tucson) to Nogales, Mexico, where we will speak with migrants and just-deported migrants. The afternoon includes a panel discussion with human rights and immigration rights activists.  Tuesday will find some of us in court, observing the deportation process; and some of us back in Nogales, doing hands-on service work for the same groups of people we saw the day before. On Wednesday we return to Tempe and the start of the January Board meeting, part of it jointly with the 2012 GA Advisory Team. This team, chaired by the Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris, was convened to represent many of the stakeholders in a “justice GA” and reports to both the Board and the GA Planning Committee. read more »

What were they thinking?

Who would the UUA Board talk to if a trustee wanted to talk to a “member congregation”?  What in that conversation could move both trustee and congregation to the kind of connection and mutual appreciation that would ultimately result in “one strong body”?  What differences do our congregations want us to make together, and are they similar to the goals that were established by the Board after two years of input from various UUs and groups across the country?  And can anyone believe – really believe – that these goals are not merely aspirational – that together we really could make them happen? read more »

A fresh fall breeze blew through Boston at the UUA Board‘s October meeting.  Yes, it was fall in New England so the weather was grand.  But the breeze I’m talking about was a fresh breeze of collaboration and purpose that hummed through the recent meeting of the UUA Board of Trustees.  And I wasn’t alone in feeling that fresh breeze.  There was a general consensus among Board members and Staff that this meeting was marked by a deepening of our sense of purpose and of the collaboration that will be necessary to realize our dreams for the UUA.  Indeed, the very topic for this blog post was agreed to by the full Board. read more »