by Natalie Miller-Moore
At the UU General Assembly in June, I attended a workshop called “Empowering Young Leaders and Building Multigenerational Community.” Here’s my main takeaway — we need to stop assuming that UU kids will grow up to leave the faith — they don’t have to.
We love it, even if we didn’t grow up in it, and we should shift towards an expectation that UUs will stay because it’s a choice, and there’s lots of room to grow. As one speaker said, “We never graduate from the human experience!” I think that we should adopt this and remind our youth (and ourselves) that there’s room for their beliefs to change within the UU framework. One speaker went so far as to enthusiastically endorse saying to youth: “I want you to stay UU. How can I help you do that?”
Several of us from college towns mentioned creating a norm where the DRE finds the contacts in the new locations of their bridging students and makes introductions to the campus representative or closest UU congregation — and we can be that for people coming to William & Mary (and Virginia Peninsula Community College, too!). We are lucky to already have such good ties with W&M through Austen and our professor / staff members.
There were a few other suggestions in the conversation and small groups, and one theme was “Tend to the Transitions!” Rituals are so important and I see Coming of Age, Our Whole Lives and Bridging as important ones, but there is also room to customize: for gender transitions, for coming out, for heartbreak and challenging times. We can be what is needed, and we can empower the youth to see it, plan it and put it into action. Having more for youth to do is important, like camps and conferences, but more critically is the simple everyday connection with social time and games. Another great quote from the session: “Church is seen as ‘where religion happened TO you,’ but YRUU is where you make it happen.”
Another fairly obvious thing was to find opportunities for youth to participate in social action — whether that’s Moral Mondays, Action Sundays, Get Out the Vote drives, or specific issues that they care about. It could be related to the environment or raising awareness about an issue they want to highlight — letting them lead, with adult participation and support can make a big difference, and it doesn’t have to be perfect.
I found the session to be inspiring — and my teenager didn’t even attend. I loved being with other UUs and talking about some of our common issues. If you attended, the session can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/838832882/9ee21177d3
Let’s keep working on building our multi-generational community and empowering others to have the benefits of being a lifelong UU!