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)