Steering Committee Transitions

Citing personal reasons, Sadie Kahn-Greene has resigned her position as an At-Large member of Steering Committee.  We thank her for her work with us and wish her well in her commitments to her local congregation.

We are excited to announce Christopher Wulff as our new At-Large member.  Christopher joins us from Toronto, bringing a wealth of experience within C*UUYAN leadership, other UU arenas, and the non-profit sector.  We bid him welcome!

C*UUYAN Wants You

We are looking for an At-Large member for Steering Committee.  Could that be you?  Steering Committee guides the bigger picture of C*UUYAN’s direction as well as the practical work for our next annual meeting.  This term runs through the summer.  Ideally, we would love for our new member to join us at our next in-person meeting, Dec. 19-21, but will continue to accept applications until the position is filled.  Interested?  A full job description and application form will be posted here by Monday.  In the meantime, please do let us know you’re interested by emailing us at cuuyan-sc@yahoogroups.com.  That way we can be in touch with the application form directly.

C*UUYAN Supports Groundwork

C*UUYAN: The Continental UU Young Adult Network
c/o Liz Weber, Steering Committee Facilitator
39 Tower St. #2
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

26 October 2008

The UUA and the Groundwork Collective
25 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02108

Dear colleagues in faith,

We are writing in support of the Groundwork Collective.

The Continental Unitarian Universalist Young Adult Network (C*UUYAN), the denomination-wide network of UUs ages 18-35, has worked with the Groundwork Collective for many years.   Groundwork has facilitated many anti-racism and anti-oppression programs for us—including the most recent Opus (our annual spiritual retreat) and ConCentric (our annual business meeting) conferences—with much success.  Over time, with successive Groundwork trainings, we have seen our individual and collective AO/AR analyses grow.  For example, with a view to further deepening our understanding of issues surrounding oppression and the ways in which it impacts our community, C*UUYAN has institutionalized its engagement in this work by adopting a policy of offering at least an hour of AR/AO programming per day at our events.  In addition to this regular programming, several Groundwork members have also served in leadership positions in C*UUYAN.  We look forward to continuing to work with Groundwork on engaging oppression issues in our communities, both through these kinds of more-formalized relationships (programming and leadership positions) and through less-formalized relationships (such as ongoing inter-organizational communication), cross-pollinating new ideas and information.

We advocate for the UUA’s continued support of Groundwork for several reasons:
1)    Trainings led by one’s peers can have a powerful impact.  At our conferences, we have seen this be a key for people to open up to anti-oppression work for the first time.  As a youth- and young adult-led, multigenerational collective, Groundwork is well-positioned to be that key.
2)    This work cannot truly be done in isolation—just as participants learn from each other in a workshop, facilitators also need a group of colleagues to return to between trainings and organizing work.  This allows processing and revision of content and presentation, deepening the work that Collective members carry out.  As a community-minded organization, Groundwork provides this vital home to its members.
3)    This work is spiritual work.  Our community benefits greatly from undertaking it through a Unitarian Universalist lens.  While other organizations could bring a secular or interfaith analysis to AO/AR work, Groundwork is unique in that its UU members call us to begin from our UU faith.

For all these reasons and more, we urge you to recognize how crucial this multigenerational, multiracial collective of Unitarian Universalist anti-oppression trainer/organizers is to our faith and our world.  We whole-heartedly support the Groundwork Collective, and trust that you will, too.

Yours in faith,
The C*UUYAN Steering Committee
Tom Bozeman
Linnea Huston
Andrew Mertz
Sadie Kahn-Greene
Liz Weber (Facilitator)

C*UUYAN Supports Groundwork

C*UUYAN: The Continental UU Young Adult Network
c/o Liz Weber, Steering Committee Facilitator
39 Tower St. #2
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

26 October 2008

The UUA and the Groundwork Collective
25 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02108

Dear colleagues in faith,

We are writing in support of the Groundwork Collective.

The Continental Unitarian Universalist Young Adult Network (C*UUYAN), the denomination-wide network of UUs ages 18-35, has worked with the Groundwork Collective for many years. Groundwork has facilitated many anti-racism and anti-oppression programs for us—including the most recent Opus (our annual spiritual retreat) and ConCentric (our annual business meeting) conferences—with much success. Over time, with successive Groundwork trainings, we have seen our individual and collective AO/AR analyses grow. For example, with a view to further deepening our understanding of issues surrounding oppression and the ways in which it impacts our community, C*UUYAN has institutionalized its engagement in this work by adopting a policy of offering at least an hour of AR/AO programming per day at our events. In addition to this regular programming, several Groundwork members have also served in leadership positions in C*UUYAN. We look forward to continuing to work with Groundwork on engaging oppression issues in our communities, both through these kinds of more-formalized relationships (programming and leadership positions) and through less-formalized relationships (such as ongoing inter-organizational communication), cross-pollinating new ideas and information.

We advocate for the UUA’s continued support of Groundwork for several reasons:

1. Trainings led by one’s peers can have a powerful impact. At our conferences, we have seen this be a key for people to open up to anti-oppression work for the first time. As a youth- and young adult-led, multigenerational collective, Groundwork is well-positioned to be that key.
2. This work cannot truly be done in isolation—just as participants learn from each other in a workshop, facilitators also need a group of colleagues to return to between trainings and organizing work. This allows processing and revision of content and presentation, deepening the work that Collective members carry out. As a community-minded organization, Groundwork provides this vital home to its members.
3. This work is spiritual work. Our community benefits greatly from undertaking it through a Unitarian Universalist lens. While other organizations could bring a secular or interfaith analysis to AO/AR work, Groundwork is unique in that its UU members call us to begin from our UU faith.

For all these reasons and more, we urge you to recognize how crucial this multigenerational, multiracial collective of Unitarian Universalist anti-oppression trainer/organizers is to our faith and our world. We whole-heartedly support the Groundwork Collective, and trust that you will, too.

Yours in faith,
The C*UUYAN Steering Committee
Tom Bozeman
Linnea Huston
Andrew Mertz
Sadie Kahn-Greene
Liz Weber (Facilitator)

Elections

June 18, 2008
Dear C*UUYAN,

This letter reaches you with information about elections at the Pre-GA Meeting and as a call to anyone who may be interested in leadership, regardless of whether you are able to join us next week.

We are quickly approaching Fort Lauderdale! We are looking forward to visioning together ways to improve our organization, and appreciate that this may include making changes to our governance structures. We have prepared an elections process to accommodate this state of potentiality. The process is not perfect, but it is designed to be simple, efficient, and flexible; we humbly present it with the best intentions for the good of our community.

On Tuesday night at the Pre-GA Meeting, we will be examining what form of leadership will work best for C*UUYAN for the coming year as well as the future. Possible outcomes to this session include deciding to keep the Steering Committee and/or Conferences Planning Committee as is, forming a task force to address specific issues from the Meeting, or creating a brand new governance structure. Thus, the elections process and elected positions that follow are subject to change in accordance with the community’s decisions. If any changes are necessary, they will be announced at the close of Tuesday night.

Elections will be held Wednesday afternoon. As of now, we are planning to elect the Steering Committee Facilitator and two At-Large Representatives for the Steering Committee. Elections will run position by position. Each candidate will be asked to give a short speech (two minutes). There will then be a brief question and answer period, followed by voting. As in years past, we will use instant run-off voting (IRV). For an interactive explanation of IRV, see www.chrisgates.net/irv/. Barring any changes from Tuesday’s meeting, we will first elect the Facilitator and then the At-Large Reps.

Along with updates and minutes from the meeting, we will post an announcement of open positions online on Tuesday night at www.uuyan.org. Candidates are welcome to run in absentia. Anyone running in absentia needs to submit a printed “speech” to futureofcuuyan@gmail.com and to a meeting participant who will read for them at the meeting. Candidates are invited to be available by phone or online chat for the question and answer session. Unfortunately, due to logistics, voting is limited to those physically present at the meeting.

In preparation for the meeting, we invite you to continue thinking about these questions for C*UUYAN: Who are we? Who do we serve? What is our reach? What do we need? We look forward to discerning some of the answers to these questions with you next week. Please contact us with any questions or comments in the meantime. You can email us at ideas@uuyan.org.

In faith,
The C*UUYAN Steering Committee
Andrew Mertz
Anthony Severe
Liz Weber
Mary Manchester
Raegan Bricks