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My news summary of the 2006 General Assembly was published this morning. It provides a relatively quick overview of the business at GA and includes a bunch of things that didn’t make it into the daily reports here.
Those of you who have been following this blog may have been left in suspense about the four responsive resolutions I mentioned in the previous post. Three were offered shortly after the Actions of Immediate Witness Sunday afternoon. One urged congregations to support the UUA’s new health insurance program for congregational employees. One (described at greater length in my news story) combined aspects of two proposed AIWs related to Gulf Coast reconstruction efforts that the Commission on Social Witness did not put on the agenda. The third responsive resolution praised moderator Gini Courter’s facilitation of the plenary sessions.
At the very end of Sunday’s plenary, a delegate improvised a fourth responsive resolution. (I had left the plenary hall by this point.) Earlier in the day, Courter had set aside her prepared report and instead invited a group of youth of color and their allies to tell the delegates about their experiences of being treated differently than white people at GA. Courter asked delegates not to applaud or seek out the youth afterward, but instead to sit together in silence after the youth spoke. She then offered some personal reflections about the difficulty of antiracism and antioppression work and asked delegates to consider how fully they were committed to making their congregations and the Association a truly welcoming and inclusive place. Several hours later, as Courter was about to gavel the Assembly to a close, a delegate offered a responsive resolution to the moderator’s report. As adopted, the resolution declares that “Delegates to General Assembly are charged to work with their congregations to hold at least one program over the next year to address racism or classism, and to report on that program at next year’s General Assembly.” And with that, GA came to a formal close.
Be sure to visit the extensive (and still growing) coverage of GA over at UUA.org. The plenary notes are quite thorough.
Finally, the fall issue of UU World will include an extended report on GA; unless something comes up in the meantime, I won’t add something new here until that story goes online. Then, of course, I’ll add a link.
Thanks for following GA here at the uuworld.org GA blog — and thanks for your feedback.