Why should GA be important to C*UUYAN?

ConCentric is an important event to C*UUYAN. Our district representatives and leadership come together and learn from one another about what we are doing in our Young Adult and Campus Ministries throughout the UUA, and we debate and reshape mission and vision of our organisation. Some of this work is done through the operation of workshops showcasing best practices in running meetings, or methods for starting a contemporary worship as a part of your local ministry. Some of this work is done in our business sessions, where our representatives debate how the C*UUYAN leadership should best operate, which projects to support, and the vision of the body as a whole.

On a larger scale, General Assembly is to the UUA what ConCentric is to C*UUYAN. General Assembly is where all the stake-holder groups of our Association come together to "do the business of our association". Part of that "business" is sharing in the work we are doing in our own groups, whether those groups be congregations and districts, Womens groups, Mens networks, professional organisations of ministers or DREs or administrators, as youth, and as young adults.

The Association does work, makes decisions, plots vision, and elects leaders at General Assembly. Many of the processes that the GA works through are multi year. At least 2 General Assemblies most times, if not 3 or 4, depending on the process. There are Study Action Issues (SAIs) which require (now) a process that takes 4 GA's, and result in Statements of Conscience, which are visionary documents the Board and UUA Staff use to direct money, staff hours, and other resources. These recently have included Statements regarding:

• Criminal Justice and Prison Reform
• Moral Values in a Pluralistic Society
• Global Warming/Climate Change
• Peacemaking
• Beyond Religious Tolerance: The Challenges of Interfaith Co-operation Begin with Us

In the further past, these are the statements and resolutions that have done the following:

• Created what we now call the Office of BGLT Concerns
• Create The Welcoming Congregation Program
• Opposed The Execution of Minors and Those Who Are Mentally Retarded
• Funding the Black Affairs Counsel
• Proposal for Phoenix as Future General Assembly Site
• Create The Journey Towards Wholeness programme

~Above from http://www.uua.org/csw

So more than just advising, the GA provides directives for the Administration of the UUA. Similarly, all the Actions of Immediate Witness and Statements of Conscience, and other social witness statements, all guide the Washington Office on how to Lobby the United States Congress.

This year will be the first that Sponsored Organisations are allowed to submit Study Action Issues to the General Assembly. Previously this was a right granted only to congregations. C*UUYAN is now allowed to take to General Assembly ANYTHING we desire that we believe would benefit the Association through a process of congregational review, and General Assembly ratification. We could say the Congregations of the UUA need to engage in discussion and work on increasing the variety of worship styles in our congregations. If the GA passed such a SAI, the congregations would have to report to the GA on their status in the successive 3 years, and the administration would take that process and make it a primary project.

Maybe C*UUYAN wants our congregations to engage in work and discussion on using Welcoming Congregation as a model to create a congregational certification for congregations that are welcoming to diverse age ranges. This might include:

• The Anchor Congregation programme of the YA/CM Office
• The implementation of bridging ceremonies for multiple stages of life
• Pro-active work by the staff and Board of the congregation to connect graduating youth with UUs in their local areas

These are the kinds of things that the General Assembly has the power to push into existence. It was the gathering of the General Assembly these past two years that allowed us the venue to showcase the best of the transformative message we have to the rest of the UU world in the form of our Soulful Sundown services. Without the General Assembly and the exposure it gave us, this years Contemporary Worship conference would not have been as successful, with the comprehensive cross-section of clergy, laity, young adult and other congregational leaders needed to take the ideas and make them take hold in the roots of our Association.

Why should GA be important to C*UUYAN?

Because without GA, we aren't connected with the power to fundamentally change the way our association works. By not engaging the Business of C*UUYAN (i.e. what we do at ConCentric) with the Business of our Association (i.e. what we do at General Assembly) we have sacrificed our right to use the largest internal-lobbying force of the UUA to make real our Vision. Without becoming an authentic part of the General Assembly, and by extension the UUA, we self-impose our exile to the fringes of the Association.

The UUA has one congregation, the Church of the Younger Fellowship, that has been created specifically to be a voice of Young Adults in the processes that govern the business of our Association, and that group isn't accorded all the rights of a Congregation in and of itself, being a programme of the Church of the Larger Fellowship. The 2003 GA Young Adult Caucus in Boston made a Caucus policy not to have the Caucus voice bloc statements, based on two realities. First, it is inauthentic and dishonest for a statement on the plenary floor to be understood to be the voice of C*UUYAN, when there has been no input from the Steering Committee or ConCentric bodies, and no system or document is in place that specifically grants the Caucus the right to claim to speak with the Voice of C*UUYAN. Second, the power of C*UUYAN and Young Adults in general is not in it's ability to stand as mob for an idea as the Youth Caucus often does, but rather in our ability to infiltrate every level of the Association with our members, allies, and like-minded individuals who can take our collective ideas and plant them. Among our membership are clergy, laity, seminarians, directors of religious education, congregation and district board members, members of Association and Board committees, and UUA staff. This accounts for our fingers being in every pie the UUA has baking, but we are quite poor at focusing our message in a fashion that lets us have the most effect, as we do not bring these representatives together in a space where the Business of the Association is addressed, nor in a place where we can make our business the business of the Association.

So how do we become an authentic part of General Assembly and the UUA?

The first step is understanding not just what the GA does, but how the rest of the power and organisational structures of the UUA work together, and with the General Assembly.

The leaders elected at General Assembly include the President and Moderator of the UUA, At Large members of the Board of Trustees, and some or all of the members on committees of the Association, which include the General Assembly Planning Committee (GAPC), Nominating Committee (NomCom) Board of Review (BoR), Commission on Appraisal (CoA), Commission on Social Witness (CSW). All these bodies are accountable first and foremost (if not only) to the General Assembly, and answer to no other authority. These bodies take care of much of the work of the Association between General Assemblies.

Much of the Social Witness processes are taken care of by the CSW, who work closely with the UU Service Committee and UU Washington Office, and local organisers. This past year, President of the UUSC Charlie Clements gave the keynote address to ConCentric. The UUSC works independently of the UUA, but there are many conjoint activities and resources, and the CSW is in the heart of all of them. There are many times at General Assembly where the UUSC is lobbying hard to have something they support be supported by the GA, because it is that support and endorsement that gives the UUSC most muscle in their justice work. If C*UUYAN wishes to be Justice Centred, our leadership, membership, and systems must work with the Commission on Social Witness, and much of their work is started at General Assembly.

The Commission on Appraisal is answerable only to the General Assembly with a directive to "review any function or activity of the Association which in its judgement will benefit from an independent review and report its conclusions to a regular General Assembly." Currently, the Commission on Appraisal is reviewing the Seven Principles and Purposes, and Sources of our Association. There could be Principles that many of us have grown up knowing that will be eliminated, changed, or replaced. If C*UUYAN wishes to be a part of this review process, like our districts and congregations are, work with the CoA is a must.

The Nominating Committee is tasked with looking for strong leaders within our Association that can add breadth and depth of knowledge to the committees of the Association, and to positions that require a degree of independence from the Board of Trustees. The NomCom made it a point over the past several years to look for Young Adults to fill seats, to bring a missing voice to many of these groups. Rarely have these young adults been strong leaders of C*UUYAN involved in ConCentric and Opus. Instead, these leaders have largely been being pulled from the Young Adult Caucus, because that has been the group that has the largest knowledge of the systems within which they'd be working.

The Board of Review hears appeals by those ministers whose fellowship is terminated by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. To date there has been no self-identifying young adult on this committee.

The MFC is not a Committee of the Association, but one of the Committees of the Board of Trustees and is the sole body that grants, reviews, and can terminate a ministers Fellowship with the Association. As a group with a large number of current seminarians in its membership, having a voice here may be more important than on the Board of Review.

The General Assembly Planning Committee does as its name suggests, and is in charge of the operation of General Assembly. The GAPC has had, over the past 10 years, at least three young adults as members who have identified to a degree as such: Elizabeth Collins, Marc Loustau, and Donald Wilson (myself). Our C*UUYAN leadership, including the GA staff, needs allies on the GAPC in order to most effectively and inexpensively engage in the work of General Assembly, as the GAPC sets not only the GA agenda, but is in full control of operations.

All these groups hold the keys to advancing the vision of C*UUYAN, and bringing that vision to our congregations, and the Association as a whole.

But first and foremost, I believe a good portion of the business of ConCentric needs involve the business of the General Assembly. This could mean the YA Caucus sends agenda items to ConCentric, such as Study Action Issues, that the ConCentric body could discuss and send their ideas back to General Assembly via the Caucus leadership.

It could also be that the ConCentric body writes a proposed Study Action Issue, UUA Bylaw amendment, report or response to be taken to the General Assembly Plenary floor to be considered by our assembled delegates. These are the powers C*UUYAN has the right to exercise.

Any authentic involvement in the General Assembly like this would most certainly entail close work between the Co-Mods of our Young Adult Caucus of General Assembly and the BizMods of ConCentric, as the heads of their respective events business as applicable to C*UUYAN. This would most likely require the ensured attendance by one of the BizMods to General Assembly each year, which would need be funded by the C*UUYAN budgets. Currently, the Chair of the C*UUYAN Conferences Planning Committee is only required to attend ConCentric. I believe that attendance at General Assembly should be added to the required and paid for portfolio of the chair of the CPC, so that anyone filling such a position has an understanding of how our Association works on a scale larger than our isolated group, and can learn how our organisation can best interact with the other structures of the Association.

In the end...

ConCentric does good work, but the scope of that work is limited not just to young adults, but to a small fraction of the young adults in our association. If C*UUYAN truly believes that we have a saving message for our Association, and we claim to be Radically Inclusive, then we must take the radical step of including ourselves in that Association, and engage it in the place where that Associations work is done, and that place is General Assembly.