The Journey Toward Wholeness Next Steps

Forming a Transformation Team in Your Congregation

Form an Anti-Racism Task Force to Organize for Change

A first step in moving forward is to form an anti-racism task force to help provide leadership for this work. The committee should work closely with the members of the board and the leaders of church committees, and especially with those who are doing social justice programs in the congregation. 

The task force:

• begins the preliminary work of scheduling trainings, and other programs to build momentum for the work ahead.  The Jubilee One program is especially valuable in starting a conversation about race and racism among the members of the congregation. The Jubilee Two program is an effective way of grounding congregational leaders in an analysis of racism they can apply in the congregational context,
   
• supports religious professionals in the congregation as they attempt to provide leadership in this important but complex work,
   
• works with committee leaders of the congregation to infuse anti-racist identity and practice into the life of the various committees: membership, religious education, music, finance, property, adult programs, and worship,
   
• and helps form transformation team to carry on the ongoing anti-racism work in the congregation and community.

Form a Transformation Team

A transformation team is created with a specific assignment—to work with leaders in the congregation or district to develop an anti-racist multicultural identity and practice.  The team is charged with working with leaders in the organization over an extended period of time to dismantle racism. And, since the transformation team is expected to create a long term organizing strategy it will need to exist as a permanent structure. Certainly the membership of the team will change over time but its mission and purpose will stay intact.

Congregational transformation teams participate in a series of anti-racism workshops, trainings, consultations, curricula, and assessments designed to teach team members how to analyze institutional racism and how to coach the institutions along the path to anti-racist transformation.

By learning to apply this powerful anti-racism anti-oppression lens to our theology, worship, justice work, and our relations with other institutions, Unitarian Universalist anti-racism transformation team members become empowered to develop strategies, actions, and relations that will make the congregation not only visionaries for, but participants in, the anti-racist, multicultural beloved communities we long to be.

The Unitarian Universalist Association has numerous resources to help you on the path to becoming anti-racist and multicultural, whether you chose to form a transformation team or not.