Text only Feb 2023 update

February 2023 Leadership & Design Team Update

In our last Update, published in July 2022, we used a special metaphor to illustrate the various perspectives of our transitional and creative journey as we formulate the shapes and shades of collaboration between Unitarian, Universalist, and Free Church communities. From Nature, we drew inspiration and a source of powerful analogies from honey bee communities.

Diverse, integrated, committed and uniquely important: these are some traits of honeybee communities that we aspire to create on our own path to our emerging global collaboration format. Our current wave of cross-pollination includes the particularities of our new members and their local contexts.

In fact, our own Leadership and Design Team beehive has expanded and broadened its representation and diversity through the inclusion of new members. They are: Elekes Zsolt from Transylvania, Romania; Renee Hills from Australia; Gerard Niyungeko from Burundi in Central Eastern Africa and Carol Maciel from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 

Zsolt is currently serving as school chaplain in Transylvania’s oldest high school; Renee is a member of a small Unitarian Universalist fellowship in Brisbane, Australia, that has links to Unitarians and Universalists in Asia Pacific; Gerard is a teacher, engineer, and Lay Minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Rutana in Burundi. Carol is an educator who joined  a UU community in Brazil after starting to study American Transcendentalism.

 Together with our members from the U.S. and South Africa, the LDT truly spans the world.

As a team, we continue to work at understanding each other’s cultural and Unitarian/Universalist contexts and the unique perspectives that we all bring to it. Our work has taken the shape of synchronous online meetings, discussions, research, lots of note-taking, and collective framework developing. One of the highlights of our ongoing process was an Online Retreat soon after the arrival of our new members.

LDT Online Retreat

The Leadership and Design Team Online Retreat happened in late October, 2022. It was an inspiring and stimulating experience that helped build LDT connection and cohesion in a way that defied geographical distances and cultural differences. This was mainly achieved through careful pre-retreat preparation with Rev. Morgan McLean and Rev. Alicia Forde; and then the guidance of expert project SOUL facilitator Jenyng Wu, a systems thinker and designer during the  Zoom retreat meetings. 

The retreat created the space for deep, inclusive, stimulating and practical conversations using Mural, an online interactive whiteboard. The team went through a process that began with sharing our understanding of the words: Leadership, Design and Team and continued with an exploration of vision, desired values and behaviors.

Values identified included: humility, respect, honesty (with self and others), trust, commitment, connection, being open-minded, kind, and future oriented. 

Behaviors that reflected such values were described as: deep listening & acting with compassion, being authentic, asking challenging questions, being willing to fail, being honest, being patient, staying present & willing to feel uncomfortable, holding space for creativity, using “I” for effective communication, being transparent & acknowledging privilege. 

The LDT team also looked at ways of  negotiating conflict, and was encouraged to think of innovative organizational structures. By the end of the last meeting, we were brainstorming: possible future initiatives, our strengths as U/U’s, and the global trends that might support or challenge us.

Future Buzz

The LDT team continues to explore and nurture the important concepts experienced at the retreat and in discussions since then.  We know that we have a unique opportunity at this point in U/U history to create an innovative, truly collaborative international body. Our intentions are inspired by an emerging vision of equity and self-determination and guided by our interactions with each other and you, our stakeholders. During 2023, we hope to develop an organizational model and appoint a transitional director. 

Pollinating Around the Globe

As mentioned in the July 22 Update, we are developing new channels for communicating with, and sharing information within our global  U/U community. Your thoughts, your visions, your community’s unique perspectives are essential to developing a future shared co-operative organization.  

One of our first ways of doing this will be in the form of  Zoom conversations with our stakeholders. We will be inviting former ICUU members and leaders to join us in small gatherings. We will hold two open conversations and we hope anyone who is interested will join. Please mark your calendars for these two open meetings:  

Tuesday, March 21 -- 8am UTC (7pm Australia ~ 1:30pm India ~ 10:00 am Romania)

and

Tuesday, March 21 -- 5pm UTC (7pm Burundi ~ 12pm Eastern US)