A Message from UUA Executive Leadership: ARAOMC Efforts

Standing outside in front of congregation, from left to right: Jessica York, Rev. Ashley Horan, Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd, Nicole Pressley, Dave Valentine, Dr. Janice Marie Johnson, Carey McDonald,Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt, Rev. Lauren Smith, Rev. Shige Sakurai

UUA Exec Team

Left-to-Right in the Photo:

  • Jessica York (she/they), Director of Congregational Life
  • Rev. Ashley Horan (she/her), Vice President for Programs and Ministries
  • Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd (she/her), Director of Communications and Public Ministry
  • Nicole Pressley (she/her), Director of Organizing Strategy
  • Dave Valentine (he/him), Vice President for Finance and Investments
  • Dr. Janice Marie Johnson (she/her), Director of Ministries and Faith Development
  • Carey McDonald (they/them), Executive Vice President
  • Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt (she/her), President
  • Rev. Lauren Smith (she/her), Director of Stewardship and Development
  • Rev. Shige Sakurai (they/them), Special Assistant for Equity, Belonging, and Change

Beloveds,

The spiritual and material work for anti-racism, anti-oppression, and multicultural (ARAOMC) flourishing within our Unitarian Universalist communities is deep and requires our ongoing attention. As members of the UUA Executive Team, we are energized and humbled to play a part in this critical work with our congregational and community collaborators.

Since the Commission on Institutional Change (CoIC) was appointed in 2017 to make recommendations for transformation – which were published in their 2020 report, Widening the Circle of Concern (WCC) – there have been shifts in our UU cultures towards:

  • An understanding that we cannot faithfully advocate equity and justice in the broader world without seeking equity and justice within our own communities
  • Ensuring that people in historically underrepresented and marginalized identities are in leadership roles and have their communities’ perspectives lifted up at decision-making tables
  • Investing resources in ways that acknowledge sustainable long-term needs for transformation work, that ARAOMC is not a “one and done” scenario
  • A both/and approach to integrating ARAOMC knowledge and skills across all areas of ministry, while also making concentrated resources, leadership, and expertise available
  • An abiding promise that this work is not an add-on to our faith, but central to our understandings of the discipline, foundation, and power of a liberating Love

To this end, the UUA and our UUA staff serve among the web weavers, helping us embrace our web of interdependence by providing resources for our journeys. At the UUA, we have made the WCC recommendations core priorities for the past few years, and it has profoundly shaped our programs and offerings to congregations. Some highlights in this Resource Guide include: our Shared Values, the Mosaic antiracism hub, the Side With Love justice organizing campaigns, the UU Common Endowment Fund’s Social Impact Investing, and the HOPE for Us Conflict Engagement Team.

We celebrate the fruits of these last eight years of effort. The items in this Resource Guide represent a curated selection of outward-facing resources the UUA has funded, supported, or created. It is not a sum total of our work on the WCC recommendations, as we have also engaged numerous internal process and structure changes. This Resource Guide focuses on opportunities for you to directly engage — to read, to learn, to join.

While this Resource Guide represents our fifth and final formal implementation report about the UUA’s work to Widen the Circle, future updates will be included in our regular UUA Staff Report or UUA President and Executive Officers’ Report, because this work is integral to all that we do. It has been built into the firm foundation of our staff, programs, and budgets. And, there remain areas of the WCC report that we continue to explore, pointing the way forward for future possibilities for our work.

We also recognize that the WCC report contained recommendations not only for the UUA, but also for our related organizations, our theological, identity, and professional groups, our seminaries, our congregations, and more. We recognize the great transformation work that so many of us have engaged across Unitarian Universalism, and we hope this Resource Guides provides meaningful support as we continue this journey together.

As always, we invite and encourage continued engagement with ARAOMC and Widening the Circle work from UU congregations and organizations. In addition to the resources you will find in this guide, you can:

In liberating love,

Your UUA Executive Team