The Board of Trustees and the Staff Leadership Team met over the two days of August 24th and 25th for our annual retreat. Dr. Melissa James of the Pacific West Region (PWR) of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) flew up from her home in San Diego to facilitate in person for the two days. I want to share with you a brief recap of what we did and some of the progress we made.
During the first day, we all told stories to each other in three rounds, patterned after how water lilies grow in a wetland. On the surface, water lilies have bright, beautiful flowers and leaves—known as lily pads—that provide support to the blossoms. Below, at the bottom of the marsh, are stalks and roots, where the environment can be murky and mucky. In between, there are new stems with lily buds that have yet to reach the surface and fully bloom. In each round, we took turns sharing experiences at East Shore that metaphorically matched these respective stages of water lilies: blooms, muckiness, and buds. It is always remarkable to me how valuable storytelling is in helping us better understand each other—learning about our joys and what gives us a felt sense of beloved community, our struggles in darkness, ambiguity, and difficult passages, and our visions and dreams for the amazing things we hope and believe are emerging.
Later that day, we focused on trust-building by learning about “braving,” a tool developed and taught by Dr. Brené Brown. The seven aspects of the braving mnemonic are boundaries, reliability, accountability, the vault, integrity, non-judgment, and generosity. Dr. Brown has an eight-minute braving video available on YouTube that we watched, which I would recommend to others. Later in the retreat, we had the opportunity to explore where the Board and SLT were strong in terms of braving and where we had growth edges. The tool offers a structured way for individuals and groups to examine what is needed to repair or strengthen mutual trust. Personally, I found it helpful to name one or two areas where the board could acknowledge having fallen short in the past and to begin thinking about how we could commit to the changes needed for better Board and SLT trust.
Our first day ended with an embodied practice of letting go, in which Rev. María Cristina offered us a ritual and the space to be vulnerable and hopeful. I am personally going through a lot in my life right now, and there are things that I know I need to let go of. Being able to share previously unspoken truths with my beloved board and SLT gave me a feeling of support and care that I know will carry me forward throughout the year. The ritual ended with all of us singing a hymn together, which simply put, just felt nice. I went home after the first day feeling so much closer to my teammates and prepared to move into the more practical aspects of board work the next day.
On day two of the retreat, each of us was asked to come up with one or more key initiatives the board might focus on for the coming year. After going around the room a few times, we had gathered a list of around twenty. Rather than jumping right in to start prioritizing that list, our next step was to group those focus items into larger categories or focus areas. But before we started working on that, Dr. Melissa performed a kind of magic trick. She flipped over a large sheet that was on an easel at the front of the room and revealed a list of 5 or 6 focus areas that she had prepared overnight. She had come up with these areas after having listened to our stories the day before. Surprisingly, we found that with few exceptions, our items clustered rather neatly into these areas Dr. Melissa had apparently divined. We quickly added one or two more to round out the list and capture our remaining items, and then we had our list. Of course, there was nothing magical or tricky about what Dr. Melissa had done. She had merely invited us into a space where we could tell our stories and then listened deeply. I marveled at how much we had managed to organize ourselves collectively by going slow, paying attention, building trust, and only then discerning how we might move forward this year.
The rest of the day, we formed small groups to start working on the top three focus areas that were calling to us. We emerged with high-level plans and then assigned owners and named follow-up actions. While I am tempted to share them here, I’m choosing not to for now, as all of this discernment is still quite fresh and raw. I think, for now, it’s more important to just share our process and let you know we are working on relationships, trust, and braving as we move into this year. Borrowing from adrienne maree brown in her excellent book, Emergent Strategy, we are moving forward with the idea that “Small is All.” In other words, large-scale transformation begins with small, intentional steps, and these small changes can accumulate and influence larger systems and structures. I will share more details next month.
Thank you for reading this installment of Board Buzz. I and other board members will be communicating with the congregation here and in other ways throughout the year. We are just beginning, and we are braving these small, intentional steps now so that we are able to lead the community collectively in the larger steps to come.
With Love and Gratitude,
David Langrock
ESUC Board of Trustees
President