LREDA Fall Conference from 6-10th Nov 2024

BlanketFort Con: Cultivating Cozy Community Care

LREDA members joined each other for four days of radical rest, community care, and spiritual coziness both  from home or by meeting up with a local in-person pod of fellow attendees.

They were part of our collective call for a Unitarian Universalism that supports the souls, minds, and bodies of our religious professionals. 

Conference resources and recordings are in the Fall Con group in the LREDA Member portal

Lead Presentation:

Radical Rest with Rev. Leela Sinha

In this day and time and moment, rest is more important than ever...right? It seems obvious.

It is equally obvious that most people, and especially most leaders, are getting less rest than ever. Even when we know better, we're struggling to attend to this most fundamental of human needs.

How can we change that, and make that change through a religious and justice lens? If our own need is not enough to make space for it, how is rest a vital part of the larger landscape, and of our mandate as leaders and educators? Imagining out from the work of Tricia Hersey in her book, Rest is Resistance.

Let's listen, think, talk, and blanketfort our way into a deeper understanding, deeper commitment, and better tools for engaging rest on our own and in our communities. 

Workshops:

Post-Curricular Faith Formation with Jennica Davis-Hockett and Rev. Tandi Rogers

That’s a provocative set of words! Join Tandi, Jennica and your peers in reflective exercises, small group discussions, and interactive activities to engage with the challenges and opportunities of moving beyond traditional curriculum models for religious education and faith formation in your Unitarian Universalist contexts. We’ll ground in the purpose of faith formation by reflecting on and sharing experiences of belonging and transcendence and harvest the group’s wisdom on shaping change. Participants will leave with new insights, connections, and tools to support meaningful faith formation aligned with today's contexts.

Building Blocks for Coming of Age: Crowd Sourcing Structures for a New Era with Rev. Sierra Marie Gerfao and Jen Shattuck

Religious educators have been talking about how we have evolved as a faith tradition, but Coming of Age hasn't changed much in the last forty years. Many great ideas have come from Threshold Conversations and the jUUst Breathe podcast episode on Coming of Age. But great ideas for programs like Coming of Age can be hard to implement on our own individually in congregations. J.L. (Jen) Shattuck and Sierra-Marie Gerfao have collected these ideas, added to them, and used them to build a new framework to help us move forward with these ideas collectively. Their workshop at LREDA Fall Con will be an opportunity to begin collaborating in ways that can help us start implementing the ideas in congregations as a professional body. They encourage you to check out their General Assembly workshop as background if you haven't had a chance to do so already

Reexamining Women’s Work with Antoinette Scully

The care work of our religious tradition has continued to fall on women, those who make up an overwhelming number of our religious educators. Join Antoinette as they speak on the unseen labor that falls on women professionals and ways to fortify our work for the long haul.

(Breakout spaces for men, and non-binary+ identifying Religious Educators will be held in the BlanketFort zoom room).

BlanketFort Space:

Jenn and Sam facilitated a cozy community space, focusing on spiritual practices, renewal and reflection.

Still need to pay for the Conference:

To pay by check, write your name in the memo line and mail it to: LREDA, 284 Hartford Ave, #1002, Bellingham, MA 02019. To pay with Venmo, use @LREDA-org. Look for the LREDA flame to ensure you have the correct link.

LREDA Fall Conference 2023: Make a Joyful Noise! Celebrate / Play / Resist

 Wed October 11th - Sun October 15th

UU religious education colleagues from across the continent joined us for our 2023 Fall Conference: Make A Joyful Noise! Celebrate / Play / Resist in Milwaukee, WI, from October 11th - 15th in downtown Milwaukee. 

We Celebrated the power of rest, play, and resistance through multi-platform worship, workshops, and identity programming that helped us engage with some of the most pressing issues in UU religious education today: creating spaces for meaningful & joyful connection, leading for anti-racism in majority-white spaces, and supporting LGBTQIA+ families & resisting anti-trans legislation. 

We offered curated rest & play spaces for IBPOC attendees, and trans attendees, respectively, while those with majority identities learned. Social and spiritual time together rounded out our annual conference, along with the UU Identity Renaissance Module offered immediately following the conference. 

Recorded conference content is available to attendees via email and in our Conference Facebook Group and Discord Channel.

October 12-16 2022

Content from last year's conference, including all presentations, worship services, and slides, are shared in the LREDA Member Resources Portal under 8th Principle Resources. To access this site you need to be a member of LREDA.

This conference was a deep dive into the work of the 8th Principle, grounded in Civil Rights History and included a visit to the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration

We had a great team of presenters and worship leaders. Our presenters were Dr. Paula Cole Jones and  Sheila Schuh. Rev. Denise Graves was our Spiritual Care Director, supporting our members through the conference. Beverly Horton and the Rev. Chris Long lead our worship services.

The conference content supported Religious Educators in their individual and congregational anti-racism and anti-oppression work. We engaged with strategies to dismantle white supremacy within our Unitarian Universalist spaces, and where our power lies to create a Unitarian Universalism where faith can be made real.

Religious Educators who are Black, Indigenous, and other members of the Global Majority were affirmed into a LREDA community of support, encouragement, and learning. 

White Religious Educators were challenged and stretched in their places of power and privilege.

Intentional space was made for people of all identities to process the feelings that arose during this conference. 

The LREDA Board committed to offering a conference that centered liberation, love and community care rooted in our Unitarian Universalist faith.

About the Legacy Museum

The conference included a visit to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, AL.

The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is situated on a site in Montgomery where Black people were forced to labor in bondage. Blocks from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America, the Legacy Museum is steps away from the rail station where tens of thousands of Black people were trafficked during the 19th century.