February Update - Lots of Exciting Stuff Coming Up!

It's been a while since I've written any updates, and I don't want to give the feeling that the ball has been dropped. I'm personally very busy working with the Census full-time, but I'm renewing my commitment to work towards building this community at least one evening a week. We've got a lot going on and I want to make sure y'all are in the loop.

I want to thank everyone who helped make the GA fundraiser happen - we did make it nearly three-fourths of the way towards our goal, and I am confident that we will bridge the gap. I put down the deposit on the space at GA and we are well on our way to Minneapolis this summer!

We're looking for folks who are interested in living in community together in the San Francisco Bay. I already have my eyes on a couple folks who are looking for housing this summer and fall, but if we haven't spoken yet, holler at me and I'll give you a call soon.

In addition, We're planning a really fun Mini-Conference for the last Sunday of March - we're going to be joining the Ecstatic Dance gathering in Oakland, and going to the Gamelan X Kecak Workshop. In between we're opening sort of an experimental space in conjunction with the Oakland Moishe House. We're looking for ideas for what to do with the afternoon - workshops, worships, anything! Please contact Kelsey to get involved with planning the March Mini-Con.

There will definitely be GA-planning, house-planning, and possibly mini-con planning calls coming up in the near future. I'm really looking forward to seeing what this community can create! Please let me know if you are interested in getting involved in event planning!

2/3 of the way there - Help us get a table at GA!

Dear Friends,

In just the past week, we've had an amazing response in support of the Light
House Project. We've had our first contacts with folks who are interested in
starting houses in other cities. And at our New Year's conference here in
Northern California, the community held an auction and raised over $500
dollars in support of hosting an exhibit space in the GA Exhibit Hall. Our
total pledges right now total $655 - more than two-thirds of our goal!

We only need to raise another $345 to offer a 10x20 space in the exhibit
hall at General Assembly 2010 in Minneapolis. Can you pledge $5, $10 or $20
to help us close the gap?


Please donate today at the link above, or contact

free.unitarians@gmail.comto pledge a future donation or to learn more

information about getting
involved. If this project inspires you, we want to hear from you!

In faith and fellowship,

Michael Tank
Suzanne Bernardi

We're Seeking to Build a Network of UU YA Houses - Help Us Get to GA In Minneapolis!

Dear Friends,

In Summer 2009, we started hosting UU circle worships out of our house in Oakland, CA, which we call the Light House. We sought to rekindle old bonds from our YRUU days and to keep the participatory liturgical tradition of our youth alive.

We've found that this way of organizing our young adult community combines the deep bonding we shared in our youth and young adult conferences with the local presence of a regular congregation and the intimacy of a potluck among friends.

We've had such success with the Light House project so far that we are planning to move into a larger house this upcoming fall, and we've begun work on creating a national grassroots network of community houses for UU young adults.

We're actively looking for people who are interested in starting or supporting partner houses to hold events for UU young adults in their own cities. We envision a funding structure that can help our communities offer regular, local, free events that engage with our communities and our generation in an open and creative spiritual forum.

We want to share this vision with the UU community nationwide. To do this, we are committed to offer a space in the Exhibit Hall at General Assembly 2009. This space will help us connect with potential funders and house organizers nationwide, while also offering a space for GA attendees to create temporary intentional community.

We need to raise $1000 by January 15 to reserve a 10x20 space in the Exhibit Hall. This goal could be reached with 100 small donations of $10, or 200 donations of as little as $5.

Would you pledge $5, $10, or any amount that makes your heart sing, to engage the national community in building a grassroots network of young adult communities?

We truly believe that together, our small investments in this effort will make a huge difference in helping young adults nationwide keep the faith in community over the coming years. Please donate today!

And if you are interested in starting a house, or have any questions, please drop us a line at free.unitarians (at) gmail.com.

In faith and fellowship,
Michael Tank
Suzanne Bernardi

December Events on the road to being a great success!

Our solstice celebration in collaboration with Moishe House Oakland was a great success. We had at about three dozen folks join us from around the Bay Area, and the night went on late with singing and dancing and accordion music. I will share pictures as soon as I have a link to them!

FUUN is also holding its first Young Adult conference at the UU Church of the Mountains in Grass Valley, CA. We'll have over 40 young adults from throughout the West attending.

We're also brainstorming on having summer retreats for leadership of the autonomous movement, and working on launching our January fundraiser to offer an autonomous young adult space at General Assembly 2010, with which we hope to promote the idea of a national network of YA houses. Stay tuned for all these exciting developments!

Board Mandates vs. Healthy Community: Not A Duality.

In the Steering Committee's meeting with the board last spring, it became clear that the District boards do not have a broad enough mandate to be able to provide all the services that a strong young adult community needs. There are, in fact, three categories in which our young adult organizing can fall: what the board must do, work that the district can do, and work which the district cannot do. These are illustrated in the Venn diagram below and are explained presently:

The work that the board must do consists of to-do items, goals, and benchmarks that the board receives directly from the UUA. The board is held responsible for meeting this mandate. It will consistently pressure its young adult committee to meet these benchmarks. The board may also be obligated to appoint the replacement to a young adult committee that is not meeting these benchmarks.

Aside from what the board must do, young adults can also organize and volunteer to do work that the district can do, which I will call district-accountable board work. This is work that deals with legality, policy, the district budget, allocation of district resources, and lobbying for power within the UUA. The young adult committee can provide resources to congregational boards and recognized congregational groups but not necessarily to individual young adults seeking to do work within congregations.

Outside of this board lies what the board cannot do. Outside of the board mandate lies anything that does not directly serve congregational boards and existing congregational groups. This includes things that indirectly support congregational boards or the health of Unitarian Universalism as a whole, such as: support for individual organizers, district-wide conferences, the maintenance of a network of individuals, and the health of an ecstatic liturgical tradition. An organization doing this work must be run by grants or donations and organize separately from UUA and District boards.

About two years ago, I envisioned a model in which there were two sets of Young Adult committees. On the inside, the YA Steering Committee would run whatever District Programming fell under the mandate of the board. On the outside, a Programming committee would plan conferences and network events such as potlucks and Soulful Sundowns together to create healthy space for the movement as a whole. Additionally, the Outreach committee would promote these events and build the UUYAN network from congregations and the general public through field organizing and maintaining the "bridge" with YRUU and young groups.

It seems quite clear that our community needs have outgrown the structures of the UUA, and our transition towards independent structures is a reflection of that reality. What's more, our community offers a radical critique of the hierarchical nature of the UUA, and seeks a new way of organizing church community. We seek a democratic politics and a participatory liturgy.

It is within this wider framework that we can ask questions like: how do we create the community we want ten years from now? How do we include people from the wider community and grow our own? How is what we called "youth and young adult programming" in the past different from our congregational life?

Baking a tasty radical ecstatic spiritual community pie!

So Debbie and I were brainstorming the other day about the key ingredents we wish for in spritual community.
Some of us grew up with the seven UU principals:
* The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
* Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
* Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
* A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
* The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
* The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
* Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.



What would you add or change?
These were originally written pertaining to congregations alone, but growing up UU my experience was that these were spiritual principals to live in my daily life. As a youth in YRUU I saw conferences as a place where we got together to embody theses principals by creating intentional community based on unconditional love and acceptance.
As an adult going to congregational services I saw us talking about our principles, but it lacked the joyous embodiment of the youth community.

So I'm curious, what are the most important ingredients to you in spiritual community? What is it about circle worship that makes you feel at home? What is it about dancing in a peace march that sets your soul ablaze? What is it that is so satisfying about making a decision based on consensus even if it took 6 fucking hours? There is something of the sacred in all of these things for me. Where do you find it? What do you find lacking in our community that you long for? What is it we're building?

Blessed Be,
Suzanne

Born-Again Unitarians?

I have been reading a book called "The Irresistible Revolution" by a young man named Shane Claiborne - a young Christian from Tennessee who poignantly describes his alienation from Christianity but his deepening relationship with Jesus. I know that may be a bit of a far-off topic for many reading this, but I wanted to share a passage from the book that struck me as familiar:

"In middle school, I had a sincere conversion experience. We took a trip to a large Christian festival with bands, speakers, and late-night pranks. One night a short, bald preacherman named Duffy Robbins gave us an invitation to 'accept Jesus,' and nearly our whole youth group went forward (a new concept for most of us), crying and snotting, hugging people we didn't know. I was born again. The next year, we went to that same festival, and most of us went forward again (it was so good the first time ) and got born again, again. In fact, we looked forward to it every year. I must have gotten born again six or eight times, and it was great every time. (I highly recommend it.)"

The parallel I see is this: in circle worship ceremonies such as Unconditional Love or Angel Wash, we are asked to accept not Jesus but simply each other. The effects of this prompt seems to be the same - the heightened emotional and spiritual feeling we feel in the worship space. Indeed, other faiths aim for this feeling as well - one of the teachers at my Sufi camp this summer stated one day that we were looking for a "born-again experience" in our dancing.

"Born-again" seems to be synonymous with "ecstatic." Would this make us "born-again" Unitarians? What does that term even mean, and what do we gain by seeking that experience?