Continental Update: Challenges, Community and Conscience
by Tim FitzgeraldMore youth participated in continental Young Religious Unitarian Universalist (YRUU) this past year than in any year before. The vastness of recent years’ growth in the continental-level community is an awesome thing that YRUU is and should be embracing, but it also has presented a great deal of challenge—both to YRUU’s leadership and to its very structure. Many of you reading this have had some personal experience with this struggle, having been to either General Assembly in Boston or Con Con (Continental Conference) near Buffalo, NY, this past summer. Although these are two vastly different events, their success and fate are distinctly tied together, and as YRUU deals with growth on the continental level (in contrast with the declining quantity of funding it is receiving from the financially-stretched Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA)) there needs to be a wide-open discussion about what can and must change, what needs to stay the same, and what must be done to ensure that YRUU successfully serves the greatest possible number of youth now and in the future.
Both General Assembly (GA) and Con Con had their struggles and difficulties this year. To most veteran GA attendees, it was clear that the enormous size of this year’s Youth Caucus (650+) stretched the staff, programming, and community-building devices of General Assembly at least to their breaking point, if not well over it. “People I talked to were awesome, but it was kinda cliquey. It wasn’t [cliquey] in Quebec, but [in Boston] people seemed to stay in their own groups,” observed Reading, MA youth Phil Mohr. Like Mohr, bridging youth Nat Balder also noticed the negative impacts of the community’s gigantic size. “It was interesting to see how circle worship works—or in some cases, doesn’t work—with 250 people.” Many youth within bridging age, who had come to General Assembly as members of Youth Caucus, felt compelled to attend young adult worships and business meetings instead of their youth counterparts. Attendance at Youth Caucus business meetings was embarrassingly low, partially as a result of this loss of older leadership. This is not to say that Youth Caucus wasn’t successful in many ways; Balder noted that he felt that the youth-led all-GA worship was one of the best he’d ever been to, and there were many examples of great youth involvement at GA this year—the fact that the youth rallied and finally passed YRUU’s pet Study Action Issue on Prison Reform is one of the more impressive examples.
Con Con, in contrast, was smaller than it has been in recent years. Just barely breaking one hundred attendees, Con Con achieved a much stronger community than GA, underscoring the inversely proportional relationship between a community’s size and its strength. Worships, planned by the worship workshop and led by the worship-coordinating duo Caitlin and Erin Stephens-North, achieved the intensity for which Con Con has become known. “The feedback on them was overwhelmingly positive,” noted worship workshop member Jesse Hitchens. The other workshops were equally engaging and impressive, and the entire conference went on a very successful trip to the American side of nearby Niagara Falls.
However, as a result of the low attendance, the conference lost money for the Youth Office, and toward the end of the conference some things that had already been budgeted for were voluntarily skimped on. This problem of making Con Con’s ends meet is nothing new, and it’s raised the question of what purpose Con Con really serves that makes it worth the large financial risk and investment of Youth Office time that it requires.
There are two other continental conferences that are crucial to note: the Youth Social Justice Conference (YSJC), which is now organized by the Youth Office (rather than the UUA’s Washington, D.C. office); and the annual YRUU business meeting Youth Council. The first is aimed at district social action coordinators and other interested youth, the second, at district youth council representatives. These both were very successful this year, with the YSJC happening last February and Youth Council immediately following Con Con. Check out the YRUU website for more information about the business done at Youth Council. The YSJC will occur again in November of this year, rather than the Spring of next year, finally implementing a change that has long been in the works that will allow district Social Action Coordinators ( SACs) to bring back the tools they learn to use at the YSJC and share their new knowledge, training, and enthusiasm with their districts for a much larger chunk of their year-long terms.
The importance of continental events may not be entirely clear to those who have not participated in them. The fact of the matter is that a lot of time and energy and money go into planning, facilitating, and executing continental YRUU events, which see well under a thousand total participants each year. Given that, as a rough rule of thumb, Synapse had about 15,000 subscribers before its database was purged and refreshed this summer, this is a pretty tiny percentage of the youth that consider themselves to be Unitarian Universalist. So, why does it make sense to devote such plentiful resources to facilitating these events?
And, more importantly, does it make sense to continue to do so?
It’s a question being asked by the Youth Office, by YRUU’s Continental Steering Committee, and by the UUA Board of Trustees. And it’s a question that requires a lot of intentional input from the UUA’s entire youth community. Already there has been a survey circulated by Youth Programs Specialist Jason Lydon through email about General Assembly’s Youth Caucus, and early in November there will be a discussion about the issue with representatives from YRUU, the Youth Office, and the Board of Trustees. At issue are ways to make Youth Caucus accountable to youth, organized enough to function as a governing body at General Assembly (which is intended to be a business meeting, not a conference), and strong enough as a body to be trusted with electing positions of real power and influence such as the Youth Observer and, even more importantly, the Youth Trustee-at-large on the UUA Board.
Additionally, Con Con is on the table as something that might need to be cut loose from the Youth Office’s workload, because of the strains of having only two YPSes come January (as the January position’s funding has been cut). The Youth Office has begun the process of assembling a Youth Council-mandated task force created for the purpose of examining Con Con’s role in Continental YRUU and how it might be modified or possibly organized and run by a volunteer committee.
The idea of changing these
conferences is scary to many long-time YRUUers. Continental YRUU as a community
depends on GA and Con Con to exist, and the purposes they serve may seem at first
glance to be minor, but they’re of immeasurable value to those who have attended
and benefited from these events in the past. Con Con may be small, and it may
serve a very small number of people each year, but it's also a community
representing all districts of YRUU and sharing ideas of spirituality, social
action, and community building. YRUU's best worships are at Con Con, and our best
leaders lead workshops and touch groups at the 50-year-old conference.
Con Con, in many ways, sets the standard YRUU districts trys to reach, and its
vision is transported back to districts by those who attend it. In this, its
reach is far beyond just the small community that actually participates.
Important questions should be asked in this process in regards to the value of
this exchange of ideas, and how it might occur without Con Con or if Con Con were
in a different form than it is now.
Youth Caucus is similarly important.
It is the youth community's voice within the larger UU community, and it has the
potential to gain a lot more influence over the UUA's politics if it can be held
together as a functioning, representative, and accountable body. One concern
that has been raised is how it fits in with Youth Council (YC), the main YRUU
governing body which is directly accountable to district youth. Youth Caucus, on
the other hand, has no real ties of accountability and doesn't have any real
power of representation because the only position of import it gets to elect is
the voteless Youth Observer to the Board of Trustees. However, YC's past
achievements, including the strong influence it has over the larger GA
community's choice of Study Action Issues, prove that there is a great deal of
potential for it to gain more power within the larger GA community.
To achieve these goals, however, a lot of restructuring and outside-the-box thinking needs to be done. UUA President Rev. William Sinkford has advocated for a new Common Ground conference (YRUU was first formed from the ashes of Liberal Religious Youth (LRY) at Common Grounds I and II in 1981 and 1982, respectively), and there will be meetings of youth and adult leadership over the next few months trying to plot a course for the future of YRUU. Keep an eye out for chances to voice your very valuable opinion.
For more information contact youth @ uua.org.
Last updated on Saturday, April 19, 2008.
