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UUSC Plenary Presentation  

Remarks of Charlie Clements, UUSC president
General Assembly 2005, Unitarian Universalist Association
Fort Worth, Texas, Monday, June 27, 2005

When I met with you last year for my first report as president of the Service Committee, I said it was my intention to make it abundantly clear that the UU was a central part of UUSC. Although the UUA and UUSC are separate institutions, the Service Committee is firmly grounded in UU principles that inform and energize our work for justice. The working relationship between our two organizations has never been stronger, and this could not have happened without the leadership and guidance of Bill Sinkford and senior members of the UUA staff.

Working together with UUA
Let me tell you about just some of the things we are doing so that, together with the larger Unitarian Universalist community, we can become a more effective force for justice in the world. We reaffirmed our roots in Unitarian Universalism by finding new ways to connect our programs to the spiritual life of congregations. We created a UUSC Ministerial Advisory Group to assist us in this ongoing process. We are expanding our support of statewide Unitarian Universalist networks so they can become advocates and make the UU voice more prominent in debates at the local, state and national levels. We reopened our office in Washington, D.C., to strengthen the Unitarian Universalist voice at the seat of national power. And significantly, for the first time ever, we are sharing office space with the UUA’s Washington Office for Advocacy. And Bill Sinkford and I are planning a trip to Africa in the fall which I believe will be a first as well.

Tsunami Relief effort
During this past year, the strength of our closer relationship with the UUA manifested itself in many ways. No where was it more apparent than in the unbelievable response of Unitarian Universalists to the devastation that resulted from the earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean. When the enormity of the disaster was known, our phones were ringing with calls from people wanting to know where they could send money or how else they might help.

The more than $2 million donated thus far has smashed all previous records for disaster relief by UUSC, and the UUA deserves a large share of the credit for the success of this mammoth human rights and humanitarian aid effort. I thank you all for your compassion and generosity.

Together with the UUA, through its Holdeen India Program and Kathy Sreedhar, we were able to reach out within days to dalits and other marginalized populations from neglected and politically oppressed communities that do not have access to traditional aid channels. People such as lower-caste dalits in India, groups that are caught in the crossfire of civil conflict in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, and Burmese migrants working in Thailand.

Guest at Your Table and Justice Sunday
Closer to home, we are strengthening our ties to UU congregations through our Guest at Your Table and Justice Sunday programs. Guest at Your Table, which is marking its 30th anniversary this year, continues to be one of our more popular programs with UUs of all ages. The Justice Sunday program, which each year highlights a call for action around a pressing social justice need, is becoming, each spring, an annual part of congregational life around the country. And remember that this is our Justice Sunday, not the one the religious right shamefully tried to co-opt from us this year to use in their unsuccessful attempt to abolish the Senate filibuster.

Workcamps/delegation trips

We also are finding new ways to involve Unitarian Universalists more directly in our program and advocacy work. Last year, as part of our get-out-the-vote campaign to mobilize young activists, we launched our first annual Freedom Summer – Civil Rights Journey workcamp that retraced the civil rights struggles in the South during the 1960s of which so many Unitarian Univeralists were a part. This year, we tripled the capacity and it was over-subscribed two months ago. It has become so popular that every year, during the second week of July, we’ll do the same journey because we think it’s a great way to inspire social activists. We are also bringing Unitarian Universalists with us on delegation trips to places like Guatemala so they can witness firsthand the effects of injustice and become advocates for changes in United States policy.

STOP Campaign
Here at General Assembly, you have heard about our new program initiatives, including promoting the human right to water, supporting living wage campaigns, and our STOP torture permanently campaign. The STOP Campaign began exactly one year ago today at the same time as General Assembly, because of the startling disclosures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison, and because it coincided with the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. Yesterday, Jennifer Harbury was in Washington, D.C., with survivors and victims of torture to discuss the next step in this campaign, which will be a mock trial in September, in which we will bring Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales and George Tenet to trial for multiple violations of United States and international laws. We invite you to join us in this Call for Justice Weekend. The mock trial will be followed by a day of lobbying to let our leaders know that torture is immoral, torture is illegal, and we will not tolerate torture as a stain on the moral fabric of this country.

Yad Vashem Award
In this time of extraordinary threats to human rights around the world, I would like to close on a positive note. We at UUSC and the entire Unitarian Universalist denomination can take pride in an honor that will soon be bestowed on two of the founders of the Service Committee. As many of you know, as the Nazi threat was spreading across Europe, the Unitarian Service Committee sent a young minister Waitstill Sharp and his wife Martha, to Czechoslovakia to see how we could assist the congregations there that were being overwhelmed with refugees fleeing from other parts of Europe.

They stayed for six months after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, at great risk to their own lives, setting up an underground railway that would get people to France and eventually over the Pyrenees to Spain and Lisbon. That underground railway saved many Jews, many prominent intellectuals and authors, many socialists, and many union organizers.

A person they worked with very closely named Varian Fry has been honored for that effort as being the only American amongst 20,000 people named as Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Memorial in Israel. Varian Fry worked hand-in-glove with Martha and Waitstill Sharp, as well as two of our other founders who came a year later, Robert Dexter and his wife Elisabeth, and Dr. Charles Joy, another Unitarian minister.

The Yad Vashem Award will be bestowed in the coming months on Martha Sharp and her husband Waitstill, and they will become the second and third Americans so honored. And we think within a year Robert Dexter, Elisabeth Dexter, as well as Dr. Charles Joy will be honored in a similar manner.

It will be a moment for us to celebrate and honor those who are part of this great tradition of Unitarian Universalism and some of the shoulders on whom we stand. We will notify congregations when this is formalized and we hope that we can have a thousand celebrations around the country to honor their courage and commitment in the face of such an overwhelming threat. Thank you.