Dear Congregants,

My three-year term on the Board started on July 1, 2024, with my first official Board meeting in September. We’re about halfway through the church year, and I want to report to you on some of the progress we have made toward making the church stronger and more resilient.

But before the progress report, I’m compelled to celebrate the powerful church weekend we experienced March 1 and 2. It reminded me of why this church means so much to me and how our work together feeds me spiritually.

The Reverend Sara LaWall from the Boise UU Fellowship preached about the strength of our denomination and how Dana Buhl, our Social Justice Director, and First Unitarian have stepped up to support her church as it battles repressive and oppressive Idaho politics. Rev. Sara said that we and other UUs have encouraged her to remain hopeful through being and acting together.

Rev. Sara was in Portland for the Sewell Social Justice Lecture. “The Tale of Two States” presented stories about how restrictions in Idaho on legal abortion threaten health care for men and women in both Idaho and Oregon. The stories were heartbreaking, but we find the strength to continue the work because we can count on our congregation to be a community of justice-seeking people, fighting together to put down oppression.

Spiritual food, offered by our church on weekends such as this, sustains me for the sometimes technical, trying and painfully slow work of the Board. Board work has its own reward, however, because we believe together that our careful work is necessary to strengthen the church and make it more resilient during difficult times. Strong policies will allow us to better center love during periods of conflict.

I’m serving on two Board committees: Governance and Finance, so I’ll start with reports of those activities, but then I also want to mention progress we are making toward better communication between us and you. 

The Board recognizes that recent experiences in the church showed us that some of the work delegated to the Board under established policies had fallen into disrepair. The last several years included the pandemic, Rev. Bill Sinkford’s retirement and calling our new senior minister, Rev. Alison, staff resignations and change in the leadership of our music ministry. We are doing our best to catch up on work that was neglected during the stress of those periods of transition. 

Much of the needed work falls to the Governance Committee. Here is what we have been doing:

1.  Helping to strengthen staff relationships and supporting our senior minister and staff by agreeing to have Board representation on the human resources advisory group established by the Executive Team. This group of congregant volunteers has already worked hard for more than a year, meeting weekly to update our employee manual and other personnel policies and practices. The group will ensure that policies calling for annual reviews for all staff members and safe pathways for employees to air suggestions, concerns and complaints will exist, if they have not already been established. And, if existing policies require clarification or revisions, they will address it. 
2. Reviewing Board policies on how the Board participates in the evaluation of the ministry of the church and the work of the Executive Team. The recent Congregant survey is part of this work to assess the congregation’s support and concerns for the church’s directions and goals. Following the survey, the next steps will invite congregational participation in updating the church’s mission and vision for the next five years.
3. Through the Board’s Governance Committee, we have established a small group of skilled congregant volunteers, called the Right Relations Formation Task Force. This task force has been charged with developing a proposal to establish a Committee on Right Relations and the procedures and processes that committee should follow. The Committee on Right Relations will be a body whose mission will be to assist with resolution of conflicts between congregants, as well as to provide education and training, generally to facilitate conflict resolution within the Church… The formation of this type of group within UUA churches and other organizations has become more common in recent years. We wish that we had had this team in place last spring, but we hope to have it fully established by the end of this church year. 
4. Assessing other grievance procedures outlined in Board policies to see which should be refreshed or deleted to assure that we have robust, functional policies we can draw upon when conflicts arise.
5. Moving forward with preparing two Bylaws amendments for this May’s Annual Meeting. The first would reduce the size of the Board from 12 members to 9 in keeping with best practices used by other large churches in the UUA. The second would protect the privacy of our congregants who don’t want their contact information used except for correspondence from the church office or Board.
6. In preparation for working with a smaller Board, increasing the size of Board Committees (Governance, Finance, and Communications) by including as non-voting members interested and skilled members of the congregation. The Board has appointed volunteer members to all three committees during the year.
7. Improving fiscal transparency by presenting monthly financial statements in the Board packets and summarizing financial activity in quarterly forums for the congregation. In March, the forum will summarize available year-to-date financial results as well as the proposed budget for the 2025-2026 fiscal year.
8. The Finance Committee recently assisted the ET in moving most of our money to FDIC-insured bank accounts which earn higher rates of interest than we have experienced previously. 

We recognize that we, the Board, have not always communicated as quickly or fully to you as we should, but we want to assure you that we have been studying the comments made in the Listening Circles last summer and fall so that we can be responsive. We are planning new opportunities for us to listen to you, and we invite you to visit the Board table during social hours after service or email us at Board@firstunitarianportland.org. We now have procedures in place to respond to your emails! We look forward to talking with you.

Best regards,

Linda Craig