Welcome and thank you to all of you who have agreed to join or continue on your congregation's board. It's important work and it takes time and we do appreciate your commitment to your congregation and Unitarian Universalism.

We want our board members to come into their roles fully prepared, and to help with that we have created several events and resources to help.

This year, we're offering a Helpful Board Habits Series board retreat on Saturday, August 5, 2023, where you will be able to engage with board members from other similarly-sized *congregations as you work on case studies and creative problem solving. After, you will be given planning tools for a self-directed goal-setting session for your board. We encourage you to sign up as a team. This series will have approximately 3 hours of pre-work on the UU Institute site. Serving on a church board is not like serving on any other type of board, nonprofit or for profit, and we address some of those differences and challenges.

If you are on the board of a large congregation, please consider our “Leading Large” board training offered on August 26.

Additional board and leadership trainings are available on the UUA website at LeaderLab. The LeaderLab training is free. You can also find all sorts of blogs, videos and other resources at LeaderLab using the search page or looking at the training by role section.

UU Institute has two courses, Centered Leadership Part 1 001 and Centered Leadership Part 2 101 that can help any new or experienced leader learn more about their role in the congregation. These trainings have a small charge for them.

Congregations also need to make sure that you are updating the UUA with any leadership changes you have - this includes officers, board members, staff and committee chairs. We get our information from the UUA and it takes about a month for that update to trickle down to our database. If you make sure to update as soon as the switch happens, the new leaders will start getting our notifications instead of your outgoing leaders sooner. This update happens at myuua.org and instructions for updating your Leadership Information can be found at the UUA website.

As always, if you have questions about your leadership changes, board retreats, leadership development resources or any other congregational question please reach out to your primary contact. We’re here to help. Congrats to your incoming board members and many thanks to those who have been serving in this most challenging time.