Applying For
The Unitarian Sunday School Society
Board

If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always gotten.

I had a friend who said to me, I sit on the board of a small organization. I think you would be good at it. At the time, they were primarily based out of Boston, and they were looking for people in other areas of the country, and I had never heard of it, and I went to the meeting and accepted the offer, because it is, it’s an exciting organization, and what they do is, what we do is meaningful and in its own small way. And I very much appreciated the people that I was likely to be working with that admired and espoused ideas that that inspired me.

I’m also really aware that that origin story is the way so much power has been passed in Unitarian Universalism in the last 60 years or so I know somebody who, and one of the things that we would really like to do is to not rely on the old people network of who knows who, because that is never a way to truly diversify and to hear All of the voices that should have a say.

Unitarian Universalism religious education, in its fully expansive and fully funded and fully dreamed form, could, and I’m not kidding when I say it, it could be the force that changes the world. Why? Because Unitarian, Universalist religious educators hold in their hands and in their hearts and in their minds the seeds of a community that nurtures people to learn who they are, to solidly identify their values, which are if they are aligned with Unitarian, Universalist, Universalist values, they live lives of generosity and justice and striving for equity. They live lives where everyone is important and everyone has a voice. That kind of possibility, that that is a spark that can ignite the little changes that inflame and become the big changes of something that just sweeps across the world and changes things.

It sounds so grandiose, and yet, what has ever changed the world has been small groups of people, knowing their own power, working together with idealism and hope and love fueling them. So what could Unitarian Universalism religious education be? It could be the force that changes the world for good.

The most rewarding part of being on on the board, I have developed relationships through working on the board, both with the people on the board, and to a very much smaller extent, some of the people whose work we have supported over the years, the learning in what it means to be A collaborative organization that works through relationship and shared understanding that’s been really helpful in my work in other places, and also personally satisfying. The other answer is, I can point to things that we have funded over the years that have made that sort of difference, and to look at the things that we have done that have succeeded and started little sparks that is really gratifying to have been a part of something that worked and something that helped. Last.

Laughing with my fellow board members on our zoom calls. The relationships that you build when you do work with people whose values are aligned with your own, whose hopes and dreams you share you. So those relationships are gold. And so yes, that’s where the fun comes.

The unexpected relationship is someone with whom, every time she would make a suggestion, I would say, but what if? And I would make a suggestion and she would say, well, let’s slow down and look at that again. It was almost as if we were working at cross purposes, and yet we knew we were not, and the opportunity to work through that kind of we determined that it was a communication style thing.

The first few meetings we had together, my thought was, oh, my God, I’m in the wrong place. This is much more work than I thought it was going to be. And she hasn’t been on the board for for years now, because she has moved to other other leadership roles, and I miss her because, yeah, because the opportunity to grow a friendship based on shared hopes and dreams, that was a seminal moment in a lot of ways,

The Decolonizing Wealth Summit that we sponsored, which brought together several different Unitarian, Universalist organizations across the spectrum, large to small. For our organization, truly made us think about where our money came from and what the best stewardship use of it was, by which I mean. We’re very much aware that the the society is an old society with roots in the Boston Brahmin system, which means that that money came out of cotton trade, came out of clothing and mills. So that money was built, that fund was built up out of money that came from the label labor of people who were enslaved. So we sit with that knowledge.

How do we use it in a way that allows us to take it from blood money and turn it to money for good?

And so the decolonizing wealth seminar gave us the opportunity to sit back and deeply assess our role in systems of oppression and how we could, rather than perpetuating even in our well meaningness And our good heartedness and our trying to Do things that created smart sparks of change, the decolonizing wealth webinar seminar gave us the opportunity to sit back and see that the way we had been doing things would only continue the way things had been. If we can change the way we are doing things, perhaps our efforts to use that money for good will bear better fruit.

One of the things, and this, this is a white supremacy culture thing, and is one of the places where I see Unitarian Universalism as a whole is working on and yet we still fall back into it, is that we fall into the especially on board work or committee work or work that has an objective. Here is what we are going to do. We have an hour Zoom meeting to do it in, and we’re just going to cut to the chase, and let’s get to the work. And board work done well, is the opportunity to have another network of people in your life who know who know you deeply, or know a part of you deeply. And the only way you get there is by sharing time together and sharing stories and sharing check ins, sharing how you’re feeling.

Not always easy for all of us. My own background is you don’t talk about personal stuff, you know, and you never admit that there’s something wrong until it is too devastating for you to do anything and you must ask for help. And Unitarian Universalist culture as it has evolved over the past 20 years, specifically, Unitarian Universalist culture on boards and committees larger than my church that I have been involved in have really taught me so much more about a different way of relating. That is, it’s okay to talk about what’s going on in your life. Right? Because the other people aren’t going to fix you. They’re not going to take away the burden. But you also don’t have to pretend that you are the strong one who carries everything you can be a whole person.

There are times and seasons where you spend more time than that hour a month or hour a quarter, and there are times and seasons where you don’t have to the other piece of that is you are working with a group of people. And the reality is that if you have a good strong board, a good strong group of people working together, the reality is that when one person needs to step back, someone else will step forward.

Somebody going in might assume that they have to have a great deal of business knowledge or money knowledge in order to be involved with a granting organization. That was actually one of my hesitations, because all of my background is working with people, not working with numbers. And the reality is that on a good strong board, with good strong people, there are people who have the strengths that you are learning, and people who will look to you for the strengths that you bring. So no, you don’t have to know how to balance a spreadsheet in order to work on a granting organization.

First of all, I was expecting that it would be a little bit dry. I was expecting that it would be high level professional all the time. And I don’t know if you can tell, but I am not high level professional all the time. I am from a working class background and from a personal culture that does not always translate well to high level board rooms, and that I was a little had trepidation because of that, and what I found was that neither of none of those things panned out.

Yes, looking at paper can be dry sometimes, but there isn’t that much of it. And the meetings themselves turned out to be people. Turned out to be people sharing things that were important to them. So it didn’t turn out to be a place where I had to be something I wasn’t, and it didn’t have it did turned out not to be a place where I had to be bored, which is one of the other things I was afraid of. 

I wouldn’t be so silly as to say it’s the chance of a lifetime or a once in, once in a blue moon opportunity, although those things might be true for you, what I will say is that it is an opportunity to be a part of something that, to be a part of something real, to be a part of something that affects change. We are hoping that it will be the groundwork of a whole different way of dealing with grants. It will be a way of growing people, a way of nurturing people who can then nurture others who can then nurture others.

I would say that it is an opportunity to find joy in doing good, solid work in a world where that is not always possible. It is chance to build relationship with other people who care, and that is gold. It is an opportunity to do with a minimal ish investment of time. It is an opportunity to do really big things. The payout is bigger than the investment,

And I would also like to say to anybody watching this, thank you for considering it. This little organization means an awful lot to those of us who have worked on it over the years, and we really want to entrust it to people who will love it as much as we have.