Welcome, everybody. It's wonderful to have you here. It looks like we have about 46 participants, have come to this workshop and we will be recording for our UU Leadership Institute. So this workshop will be available to others as well. So be aware of that. If you have your cameras on, your, your image might show up in the recording. And also, if you ask the question out loud, that might, show up too. So, welcome. my name is Sarah Gibb Millspaugh. I am on the regional staff of the Pacific Western Region. I'm based in San Diego, California on Kumi Island, and I am an olive skinned white woman with brown eyes, black salt and pepper hair and, glasses and braces, sadly, but it had to be done. It's really a pleasure to see you all. I'm on our Safe Congregations team and one of, I'm one of the Pacific Western Region Specialists in safety, and our team has people in all of the different regions that work to support our congregations. So I'm one of the people you can call along with Annie Scott, if you're in the Pacific Western region, or if you are in other regions. You have wonderful other members of those teams in your region that you can, can, get support from if you need that specific support. We also have Chanel Gomez from the UUA events team, as our tech support. And Chanel has been phenomenal in leading and organizing this whole event. So major gratitude to Chanel. If you need any tech support during this time, you can chat her and she will help you. I'd like to invite us into a grounding exercise. This is one that has a lot of it's exercise with a strong track record, shall we say, for helping people. When we are thinking about scary things, when we're feeling anxious, when we're feeling our sympathetic nervous systems get activated into a fight, flight, freeze sort of space, this exercise can help us bring that down. So I want to be, want us to begin from a grounded place. So I invite you to find a comfortable seat, or if you're, if you just want to lie down and you can still hear, you can do this lying down. Invite us to maintain some slow, deep and long breaths. And once you find your breath, we're gonna follow five steps counting down from five. So first I invite you to acknowledge five things that you can see around you. It could be a pen, it could be a spot on the ceiling, it could be anything in your surroundings. Look at five things you can see, take some breaths. And I now invite you to acknowledge four things that you can touch. It could be your hair, it could be a pillow, it could be the ground under your feet, things that you might already be touching or things that are within your body's reach. Now I invite you to acknowledge three things that you can hear. These could be any external sound. This could be your belly rumbling. This could be, birds chirping outside, cars on the highway. Focus on things that you can hear. Now, if I you to acknowledge two things that you can smell. Maybe you're sitting at a desk and you smell a pencil, or maybe you're in a bedroom and you smell, your bedding. If you need to take a brief, moment to move and find a scent that you can smell like soap in your bathroom or nature outside, you can do that. But identify two things you can smell. And now I invite you to acknowledge one thing you can taste. What does the inside of your mouth tastes like? Like gum, like coffee, like the meal you might've just had, or the snack. Acknowledge the taste and then just breathe with a couple of breaths knowing that we have come back to our senses and feel grounded in our present place, our present time, to know that we are safe and felt. I'd like to introduce our workshop with a metaphor, because I was always one of those kids that worried about worst case scenarios quite a bit. Even though I had a happy childhood and I was safe and well loved, I was often really hypervigilant about what could go wrong. And I would go, you know, on a, on a walk on a local nature trail, and I would bring band-aids and the first aid kit and ace bandages. And, you know, I would just constantly be thinking about what could go wrong. And I've learned that sometimes, like that's a gift and that's a burden that I've had to learn to be prepared, but also to make room for joy to not always be focusing on what's going wrong or what could go wrong or what terrible thing could happen to learn when I'm over preparing to a degree that's unhelpful or obsessing about things that are beyond my control, but also learning to take the reasonable steps that are within my control. And to recognize that I'm also in a community, a web of support, and I cannot individually plan for everything. So in doing that, my, that spiritual work for myself, I realize that I'm often taking risks and not thinking so much about it because it's just part of how we are. So the safety policies that I'm going to present to you are kind of like installing airbags or seat belts for the congregation, right? We drive in vehicles all the time that are prepared for the worst, that they're prepared for a high speed, catastrophic accident where they can hold us and minimize injury and make everything much better than it would be without those, that safety equipment. But we rarely think about that. We are able to take risks, we're able to drive our car across the country, we're able to go on that road trip and have a good time. So instituting good policies and practices in our congregation is there to keep us safe in that same way. It's like putting on our seatbelt so that we can get on the ride of Unitarian Universalism and we can go places that are expanding our faith and making our world a better place, and know that we have those, those safety mechanisms in place should they be needed. This workshop is having three parts. The first section will be about addressing destructive behavior and policies that we can use for those. Our second section is about protecting our spaces, both online and in person. And our third is about building our toolbox of responses. And we'll have a good time for questions and answers at the end. I don't anticipate that my talking portion will be that long. Okay. And you're seeing my slides, right? Yeah. Okay, good. I didn't see the little green box. It's often around the slides. So addressing destructive behavior. A destructive behavior policy is something that we have in our congregations a lot of the time. They're usually designed for, people within our congregations, not often designed with a person who's not already part of our congregation in mind. So we, we strive to make our congregations to be welcoming places, but all people are not actually welcome, right? There will be hostile intruders people who are there to harass, target, pick it, you know, threaten violence, et cetera. And so we need to know our rights and be able to have some policies in place for, for those occasions when that might happen. So one of those things that we can have as a destructive behavior policy. The destructive behavior is something that is defined as dangerous, destructive, or offensive to, to others in a way that gets in the mission of, in the way of the mission of the congregation. And you can develop policies for dealing with destructive behaviors of hostile intruders, and one that clarifies your rights. You are private property, you really have the right to refuse service to anyone without explanation. And, that, that goes against some of the ways that we often think of our congregations as being welcoming to all, but we need to understand that we have that ability to do it. So I, I wanna know from you, input in the chat, what are some times that we might ask a person or a group to leave? What are some occasions that would make you say, Hey, you're not welcome here. Or you would want your congregation to have the capacity to say, Hey, you are not welcome here. Yeah, I would say, threatening behavior would certainly be something like that. Verbal threat, physical threat, Verbal threat. Physical threat. Yep. Disrupting the service. Uhhuh, heckler, someone calling names, someone's hitting somebody else, somebody is drunk or high on drugs, they go against our covenant of right relations. Yep. They might not even know of the covenant of right relations if they're a stranger, but being disrespectful. Well, and I, I Think brandishing a weapon. Absolutely. Anyone who is threatening a specific member. Anyone who's threatening a specific member Mm-Hmm. Destruction of property If they refuse to listen to directions, If they refuse to listen to directions. Yep. Disruptive or aggressive filming. Right. That's been happening more and more now, that pretty much everybody has a phone in their pocket that can film things, taking things that belong to the congregation without asking. Mm-Hmm. We've had a person who was aggressive and we asked to leave. And, this was a person, you know, we said, you can come back when you agree to behave according to our covenant Mm-Hmm. And she simply has refused, you know, to agree to that whatsoever. Mm-Hmm. And so, you know, she's no longer part of the congregation. Yeah. And that, that happens, um, with some regularity. What we have actual congregation members who just cannot keep their behavior within the bounds of right. Appropriateness in the congregation and do not want to agree to something, to, to change that behavior. Sometimes they cannot. Allison asks, what if they have mental illness? And that's true. Somebody who has a has mental illness, has fewer degrees of control sometimes over behavior that could be aggressive or be perceived as harmful or be actually harmful. And one of the resources that I'll mention later is mental health first aid, which is a way of addressing some, some of those concerns. Yeah. So we have so many different kinds of occasions when we might ask a person or a group to leave our premises. And, and I'm wondering what, at what point, what are some situations where you think we should involve authorities? And when I say authorities, I don't just mean the police. I also mean some communities have like, emergency mental health authorities that can come and, and help people that are having a mental health crisis, et cetera. What are some times when we just really do need to reach out and involve authorities? I can give you an example. Mm-Hmm. I don't know all the details of this because it happened before I came to the church. But, there was a woman who was disruptive in this church. She was known to have a mental illness and to refuse treatment. And, at some point it became known largely because she bragged about it, that she owned guns. And, the congregation decided they needed to involve the authorities. And there was a document drawn up, I guess, by the police or someone saying that, if she came in the church, it was considered to be criminal, criminal trespass. She wasn't allowed in the building or on the parking lot. Well, they had a do not trespass order. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. We saw, if somebody is having a sort of a, I'm not sure if this is an answer to the first question or not, but if someone's having a psychotic episode, shout shouting, talking with themselves, being aggressive, I think that might be, and Allison said, when mental illnesses, but also you need some mental health, health often beyond what's available in the congregation for someone at that point. Or when someone is in immediate danger to themselves or others. If you need a police report, you end up needing to call the police. Jill brings that up. And, and that's a really good point, because sometimes for an insurance claim, you do need a police report. And, um, even if you are hesitant to be involving the police in a situation like in vandalism, in an area where the police are hostile, you might not be able to get your insurance claim without involving them. And Santa Rosa has a mobile mental health crisis team, and there are some various other resources. Ally is raising her hand. And, Ally, I want to just say one more thing, before that is that even though we, there are so many reasons not, not to rely on police for our everyday community safety, we have very few resources for being able to deal with an active shooter Mm-Hmm. Without calling the police. So I, I think there are some instances where that's going to be who the best trained people are to be dealing with what's going on. And, with, with real credible threats or actual violence going on in, in the congregation, if you need help discerning what to do, in advance by creating a policy, you can reach out for support to your safe congregations team members. And also just have some real discernment congregations, conversations in your congregation. Allie, all I was going to say is if you've got somebody who's disrupting the service or whatever programming, you can ask them to quiet down once or twice or, go out to the atrium or whatever you call the space outside your sanctuary, to discuss it. And if they refuse the second time, then call 9 1 1 because they're trespassing. That's excellent. You, you just put into words, a kind of a policy. Right? Right. So in, in this workshop about policy making, we're going to help you do some thinking about creating policies. Like we have a policy that we will try deescalation and that will give our folks deescalation training, and that we will contact authorities if they refuse to, to leave or if they're threatening violence or et cetera, et cetera. So having a policy in advance and helping people understand it is, is incredibly valuable. And so we will do actually some more in-depth conversation about some of the other resources we can draw on. But one of the most likely places that we will be facing hostile, targeting is online in our digital spaces. So we can create policies as a congregation about how we can keep hostile intruders from getting their hands on our congregation's data, or messing with it, or hurting us in some way from that. So, um, you can imagine what kind of information the congregation's, computers, and cloud services have about members. There's financial data, there's address data, some, some contact management systems that congregations have, have pastoral data and details about problems that are going on in a person's life, or vulnerabilities that they might have. There are thing, there's information about children about their various health diagnoses and special needs if they're involved in the RE program. There's all kinds of information that's there. And there's also for people who are high profile or might be targeted in your congregation, like your ministers and staff or your, your leaders and spokespeople, all of their phone numbers, their email addresses, their, their home addresses. So you can do some policy creation to do things like protect the, the directory and not make it easy for someone to either find that online or break into a secured place where it is online. Policies on pass, on folks who have access to sensitive information using strong passwords or two factor authentication processes. You can also create policies on, having data security education for the staff and the board. And there's additional recommendations. I'm going to give you a handout with some links. And one of the links is to a, PDF that's online from the Anti-Defamation League. It's called Protecting Your Jewish Institution. We've been recommending it for years for UU congregations too. And it has a whole section on digital security. And one of the questions it asks is, do you have a policy regarding security steps to be taken when someone with significant access to your confidential information leaves your organization? Because sometimes that sort of thing can become vulnerable once they're gone. And so there's all of that to think about. Additionally, we have our social media, our YouTubes, Google reviews, Yelp, and other sites. They can become platforms for harassment and threatening comments. We've seen this in a number of cases and establishing rules for your Facebook groups, maybe not having a public Facebook group for your congregation where a hostile person could see exactly who's involved in your congregation. you know, people often have things like their cover photo includes pictures of their children, their loved ones. Information about that is easily found. So if they can identify your help from the public Facebook group who goes to the congregation, and then get more identifying information from the social media account, it's a way into harassment. And then there can be rules too on comments and, how people engage in those groups. Some strong moderation policies for those spaces. And also policies on monitoring and blocking, noticing when people are making comments on YouTube about your gay pride service and saying harassing things, things like that. Because sometimes we don't even know, we don't even track like our, our pride service from 2022 is still up on YouTube and there's this whole thread of white nationalists saying all these nasty things that suddenly emerged. And we might not even be aware because we're not looking. So the policy creation really can involve saying like, who's responsible? What are we trying to require here? And also how do we keep educating people on it? How do we keep in communicating and educating about what, what we need and, what's going to keep us safe? So it's, it's a lot to take in. What, what could go wrong, but just keep thinking of it as like getting the seatbelt and those airbags in. Because probably a lot of this is not going to happen protecting our physical spaces. how many of us have policies on locking and unlocking the building and when it's open and when it's not. Oh, to the public? Yeah, I see some hands. It's, it's something that not everybody has. some congregations have a lot of different people with keys and codes, and they can lose track of who has keys and who has codes. And, um, we policies and practices for securing the building at closing time. What does it mean to secure the building? Are there all kinds of windows and doors you need to go check them all? Um, having some ways of instituting that is important. And also policies on staff or, or even volunteers just working alone in the building and understanding what, what are the safety practices that you're putting in place so that they do not, face a hostile intruder alone at a vulnerable time like that, more and more congregations are getting security cameras and ca um, alarms and buzzers or doorbells with cameras and various things like that. And that's been happening just as a lot more people are getting them in their homes because they're getting more accessible, money-wise. And considering a policy on how that that data is used is also worthy of consideration. Like, do you just, if you see that there's an intruder, do you just send that to law enforcement or for them to investigate, or probably not necessarily get to it because it's not high priority unless they did something wrong. Or do you try to do your own investigation by sharing footage with people in the congregation and figuring out who this might be? So there's a lot of, a lot of choices you can make in those kinds of policies about our physical spaces. And then we have, we can consider our congregation to have a whole toolbox of responses. Some of us have various skills in response that we're already bringing. Some people in our congregations have medical training. They know first aid. Some people have deescalation training from their other work settings. Some people have real knowledge of fire safety and evacuation procedures. But a policy will help you have to make sure that you have, you continue to have those things in your toolbox by understanding the need to continually do education and engage people in training. It's like every year you have a new collection of ushers and greeters and some of those first people who are out there, in, on a Sunday morning or during events, and you're always having a changing staff. So the policy can help you keep that toolbox supplied. Some of the things that I was thinking about as I put this together is, what are our procedures for hostile visitors so we can make a, a policy, some guidelines on that and make sure that people know about it. It, I mean, people who are working with visitors know about that. What, how might we create a policy to help people who are having a mental health crisis and offer mental health first aid? One of the things that happens in these times of increased hatred by white nationalists and Trumpists and others, is that it's often people who are experiencing just a tremendous amount of hate and anxiety who take that, that next step to become violent. And sometimes that has to do with a mental health disorder that they live with. And so sometimes there might be someone who's out front who's screaming all kinds of hateful things and threatening violence, but they, but as you can, as you're talking with them, they, they just don't seem that coherent. They don't seem to actually be armed. Maybe they really need some mental health first aid to like, help them, you know, to get them a glass of water, help them sit down and help them access the, the people and the resources that are gonna help ground them and get them to a place where they're in a better situation. So there's links in, in my handout that will connect you with resources, I mean with trainers, that do mental health first aid training. And, it can be very helpful in many of these situations. Also, there's, there's specific training in deescalation or deescalation techniques that help folks be able to just help a hostile person, just take it down a notch, you know, and then take it down another notch ways of engaging with them that will be more effective in, in you, getting them to actually comply and leave basically. Also, of course, there is specific training available in active shooter prevention and response, and creating a policy about how often the congregation will, will engage in those practices and how they'll do it is quite valuable. There's online training for it. You can also access local training for it, and they tend to, there are different kinds of training, and you'll see some of those listed on our Safe Congregation's website. There are some methods, there's one called ALICE and there's one called, run, hide, fight. And there are there are really strong ways for us to be able to keep one another safe in conjunction with calling law enforcement to, you know, with a SWAT team to come in and do what they need to do. That, that it's, it's important for congregations to know, even though it feels really scary to, to visit that conversation. I also mentioned in another workshop that the, the police, when whenever we have law enforcement or, a community leader who comes in to do an active shooter training who is very pro law enforcement, we have to filter it through our own, our own faith values. And so I went to a training at the first Unitarian Universalist in San Diego a few years back that was led by someone from the city who was a former police officer. And it was a helpful training in so many ways about identifying exits and entries and ways of, evacuating and training. So it was great to have it in person, but at the same time, he said things like, well, if you see anybody su suspicious, just call the police. And, and we're not gonna do that because we're a little more nuanced than that. Like, sometimes our implicit bias could make us think someone is suspicious, or this congregation is in an area with a lot of unhoused people who are dealing with addiction and they might give off some funny vibes. We're not gonna just call the police on them. So we have to filter it through our UU values and come up with our own response plan for what we would do if we saw someone suspicious. I see a couple people are private messaging me asking for my handout, and I can give that to you, in just a minute. I, I'm almost to the slide that has the handout link, and I'll pass it along in the chat. It's a Google doc and it's also going to be on the UU Institute website in perpetuity. Other policies that we can make have to do with medical emergency response, making sure that we have AEDs for heart, heart attacks on site and training and CPR and first aid and other kinds of trainings that the American Red Cross offers. Even at the UUA, at our, our offices, we make sure that staff have training in those things. Not all staff, but a significant enough number of staff. If there were an incident to happen at at work, we could keep each other safe until, until medical personnel arrive. There's also a training called Stop the Bleed that's been recommended. That is very helpful if someone, for example, is shot or stabbed, that you have people around who know specifically how to use everyday materials to minimize the impact of, of that wound and help stop the bleeding. And I believe that's an online training. Also, thinking in advance about evacuation procedures. A lot of us have insurance companies that mandate that we have light, you know, exit signs that are easily accessible, but not all of us do regular fire drills. Not all of us do regularly think about how do we, how, how do we evacuate children and people who have, mobility disabilities that, that can't move as fast or maybe can't do stairs, if there's stairs required, how do we, how do we help everybody evacuate and do that? Well, so that requires some careful thinking and some policy making in terms of how you not only plan for evacuation, but how you educate the congregation. Now. What else, is there anything else you would add to this toolbox or like what other kinds of responses? I mean, how else, how you would help build up your response toolbox as a congregation? I guess I would I haven't heard much mention of if there's a noisy demonstration outside the building, like do we respond? Do we just lock the door? What do we do? Right. Not necessarily dangerous, but disruptive, Right? Again, they are, you have private property, you have the right to get them off your property, but if they're in the street or if they're across the street and they've got a bullhorn, what what you might do. And so I, I have seen some resources, actually, I can, Brotherhood Mutual had some resources on it. They're a, a, an insurance company for congregations that isn't, most of our congregations have church mutual, but this was just a resource that was online about what to do if there's a demonstration outside your congregation, so you can take a look at at, at things like that to, to Google around. I think that's great to have a policy on that. fire prevention in fire prone areas. Yes. Weather, fire, yes. I'm thinking about, I I mean there's so many things that can go wrong. I was thinking specifically about white nationalists and, and other kinds of groups like that targeting us and those safety toolboxes, but all the other kinds of safety around child safety, around, safety from, sexual harassment, well fire, all of those things are important too. I Oh, yes. So, one of our commenters, one of our participants said they just had a situation where someone used a racial slur during worship, and they've been trying to figure out how, how we can learn to speak up against this from any chair or the designated if the designated leader doesn't intervene. Yeah. So that, that requires some thinking through that scenario. It requires maybe not, not not just policy, but also culture change on how do we, we have such a culture of just, sitting quietly while worship happens instead of being like, could we go back? M was that word that he said? but it impacts other people. So how, how we do that. And, Lenore says, just curious about people carrying weapons entering the property. Yeah. So there's also some congregations have no weapons policies and especially in some states that are open carry, our congregations have needed to post something, um, that on the door to say that this is a place where we can't have weapons. This is a place where you can't do open carry because it's assumed I believe in those states that it is permissible unless it's, unless it's explicitly excluded. I'm going to share the link for my handout. And what I want to know, from you is as you listen to all of this, this workshop and today, what, what do you think your first PO priority will be in terms of policy? What policy do you feel like you, you need in your congregation? You can write it in the chat or say it out loud. Ed, were you raising your hand? You can unmute. I think we would start with anything that comes in the front door, because the group of people who have talked the most about getting these policies are the hosts or greeters. It's under membership. And so the membership team leader has been asking us when we're going to do some of this Mm-Hmm. And so then that would require training. Yeah. Yeah. So some training for the ushers and the greeters and the, the first, the first Hello folks. That's really important. Allison wrote mental health first aid and de escalation training policies. Mark wrote, considering the weapons policy, Tamara, that we need to revise our policy for disruptive behavior as well as our right relationship congregants, and quite a few policies, but probably need to revisit them since covid. Yeah, that's true. Things have changed. Not just having the fact that we have a virtual space in addition to a, in person space now, but also societally. Things have just, the whole scene has, has shifted in some ways that are, that are more threatening. We are updating our, Hello? Yes, go ahead. Yeah. We're updating our policy to, of evacuation to include non-mobile people. Mm-Hmm. We had a provisioner who had a severe stroke and he's totally paralyzed and he's come back to church. Yeah, yeah. Including non-mobile people in your back, right? Absolutely. Mm-Hmm. Someone says they have walkie talkies. someone says that they're still learning what they need. Um, Denise says the ability to communicate between the meeting house and RE, I assume there are two buildings. Yeah. So having, having some kind of walkie-talkies can be, really valuable, for some means or emergency communication between personnel and volunteers. And of course, the walk and talkies can be helpful for non-emergencies, just to say there's a kid walking up the path who's on their way to the restroom or, you know, whatever you need to, to share between the, between the buildings. But that's a super great suggestion. Um, someone talks about the policy and agreements around known offenders to reenter the community or not, and that's something that safe congregations team can partner with you on. When, when there has been somebody who's been involved in your congregation or has not been involved, but is, but you're aware that say they, um, they were in prison and they're coming out of prison and that they were in prison for, for violent things or for abuse. Like how do you develop a, an understanding with them that helps, helps ensure that there are gonna be good boundaries in place and, um, we can offer you some specific guidance on those questions. In some ways it really depends on the person and the, the situation. So I see. So some, yeah, some people are just chatting about some of the different pieces about no weapons policy and about offenders. Well, I just wanna say, I'm really grateful to each of you for coming. I was on the team that started thinking about and planning these workshops back in May, and we didn't know who was gonna be here. We didn't know, we didn't know how the scene was going to involve evolve nationally and with our churches since that time. And, I'm just really that so many of you dedicated your Saturdays to being with us and being in Unitarian Universalist community learning together on how to keep our people safe. There are really, it is a very high calling to, to spend, your time working to keep our communities safe. I truly appreciate it, and thank you.