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Jun

21

GA 1st Day Recap

Filed Under ga, uuism

First, a quick run down - followed by details on selected items (located under the cut).

8 am: Right Relationships Team orientation

10 am: DRUUMM booth set up

11 am: Young Adult Caucus staff meeting

12:30 pm: Costco run, and drive home to pick up food, supplies and Michael, who will be facilitating first AR/AO event for YA Caucus

3 pm: Young Adult Caucus Orientation, and unloading of snacks and supplies for YA mixer and other events that will be happening later.

4:30 pm: Go grab dinner with Michael, pick up supplies at Office Depot and prepare for first workshop

6:45 pm: First AR/AO workshop (Reasoning about Racism)

8 pm: Opening Ceremonies

9 pm: Plenary I (introduce self as part of Right Relationships Team)

10:30 pm: Blogger’s Reception (which I had wrong time and no room info for, so was late)

12 am: Return to hotel

Right Relationships Team Meeting

This is the group that Gini Courter called for in order to have a structure in place that would officially support the covenant of the General Assembly community. There are several ways the group has set out to accomplish this, and most of them have to do with maintaining communications between different constituencies of GA. There is also some conflict mediation involved, an understanding of available resources (i.e. chaplains, etc), and access to Gini and other leaders for situations that need a lot of guidance. The meeting was led by Petra Aldrich (young adult, former UUA staff person, Groundwork trainer), the chair of the RRT. Also in attendance: Janice Marie Johnson (former DRUUMM president, conflict resolutions specialist, educator), Scott McNeill (Young Adult Caucus moderator, seminarian of color), Rev. Wendy von Zirpolo (representative from Allies for Racial Equity, serves on Accessibilities committee), Jenny Lotze (HUUPER - “co-dean” of youth caucus), Jason Lydon (young adult pastor at Community Church of Boston, also of the Groundwork collective), Tim Murphy (GA Planning Committee and ARE member), and myself, Hafidha Acuay. Unable to make the meeting were Elandria Williams, George Brown, Esther Rosado and Beth Norton.

The agenda for the meeting was basically about gaining an understanding of who would be where when, the community “check-ins” at plenary and nightly entertainment, introducing the RRT at the first plenary, and how to access resources. We also prayed for Dr. Jim Brown, an elder in the community who had a stroke here in Portland just in the day before GA. Jim has been an active UU for many, many years, and is a former DRUUMM president. His teenage son, George, is an active member of the youth and young adult community.

DRUUMM Booth Set Up & the Exhibit Hall

At the exhibit hall pass table, I watched a middle aged woman try to enter the hall without a pass, and be called back to the door by the woman who was staffing the pass table. The convention center employee was pleasant, but the UU woman was definitely not. I wanted to ask her, “So … are we waiting until GA officially begins before we try out those seven principles?”

Got my pass, met up with Elandria Williams’ (DRUUMM GA Coordinator) parents who were setting up the booth. (E was delayed in DC due to United flight cancellations). I met Sam Williams (no relation), a black man from Honduras (many people don’t know about the African descended communities in Central American countries), who works for the UU Urban Ministries project that’s out of Boston. I could have talked to Sam for hours; he is very calm, warm and complex. My first impression of him is that he is a very good man. I also met an older white guy named Ross who was at the Humanist Institute table. I reviewed some of the materials there and talked with him about it. I’m interested in further exploring my humanist identity, and putting that to work within people of color communities and also the world at large. The program of the HI sounds like something I could do without putting the rest of my life on hold, so I’ll do more research and maybe will apply someday.

Young Adult Caucus Staff Meeting

Met with rest of Young Adult staff, plus Michael Tino and Nancy DiGiovanni of the Young Adult and Campus Ministries office. Only person missing was Lyn Cox, one of the chaplains. After brief check-ins, we hashed out details for orientation, came up with more supply lists, discussed the “chats for change” that will be taking place at the young adult booth. I talked more about my game show, Amber (entertainment) discussed fun social activities for young adults this week. I informed everyone that none of the anti racism and anti oppression young adult caucus events were listed in the GA program - not even as designated time slots. No one had realized this and people were surprised, especially Tino, who submitted the Young Adult schedule and say the AR/AO times were on there. No one knows what happened, but that meant all publicity had to happen by word of mouth and daily young newsletter. Later, I had a discussion with Anthony Severo (of C*UUYAN steering) regarding the time slots of the workshops. They all occur during dinner time; the first event is on Day 1 - which is awful - and the last event is sandwiched between GA Closing Ceremonies and Final Young Adult Worship (it’s been cancelled). We’ll try to get that fixed for next year; it looks like anti racism and anti oppression just got whatever slots were left over.

Young Adult Orientation

About 50 young adults, 70% of whom appeared to be female. Not a super enthusiastic bunch, but they could have just been tired. All the staff gives their little spiel. I was impressed by the brevity of almost everyone. It was very apparent to me at how the young adults lack any discernible “culture.”

Reasoning About Racism Workshop

When we arrive to the room to get going on the workshop, the doors are all closed and locked. Convention center staff has to be called in to unlock the doors. Several people who had come by, interested in the program, left before the doors were opened. The event begins on time because we were there early (thank goodness), but attendance is low, as expected. Michael, the presenter, covers different types of logical fallacies and answers questions about how to respond to various arguments. He is very nervous and feels he is boring. In watching him, I realize that a better format would have been a round table-style discussion that was ENTIRELY question and answer. He is extremely knowledgeable and good at distilling complex information into simple terms, but as a presenter he is struggling. Also, the group is very small, and a few minutes into it, a group of extremely elderly people walk into the room to eat snacks and do I don’t know what. Also, convention staff enter through the room multiple times to make requests about chairs, doors and other stuff. Very disruptive. I take a lot of mental notes about how to make this work better next time, and afterwards I tend to Michael, who felt he was “very boring.”

Opening Ceremonies

The song that’s sung is pretty catchy, although I marvel at how the music sounds like it popped out of a contemporary Christian church album. There must be a school or someplace where they teach people how to make their songs sound like that. The minister from my church, Marilyn Sewell, welcomes everyone and makes NUMEROUS cringe-inducing remarks about Portland and Oregon being “the frontier” in a myriad of ways. I can’t believe she said this, given the fact that previous GAs I’ve attended have had opening ceremonies that are sensitive about the role that native Americans/indigenous folks played in like, occupying the land we now call America. I’m just not sure what happened there, but the rest of Opening Ceremonies was pretty good for me. Gini and Rev. Bill talked about previous GA resolutions to address gender and sexual orientation inequities and how UU congregations have responded to those resolutions. They talked about resistance to work on racism, and how challenging status quo is always hard work, but we’ve done it before, still need to do it, etc. We sang, “Guide My Feet,” which is a song I really like.

Plenary I

I’m not a delegate and am clueless about all the pomp and procedure of plenary, so I distracted myself until it was time for me to go up there with the rest of the RRT and introduce our team. I hate getting up there and having my head blown up on that GIANT SCREEN, so I just focused on my lines. I got like two hand claps which made me feel like I must have been inaudible or disliked - until several other RRT members spoke after me, and I realized they also only got two hand claps, as well.

Bloggers’ Reception

I’ll give this a separate post later, but briefly: A lot of bloggers that I read were missing - including Rev. Sean, Peacebang, Rev Clyde (who I don’t think is at GA at all this year, and whose blog isn’t active right now) - but there were some good folks there!