March-July 2005
To: Young Religious Unitarian Universalists and their Allies and Supporters
From: The UUA Youth Office

Note: This response was originally drafted in March of 2005. Because of other issues taking up a considerable amount of staff time, we were not able to finalize and post this response until July. We are sorry for any inconvenience this delay may have caused.

Responses to the Con Con Decision

After the Youth Office's decision to withdraw support from Con Con, we invited feedback from the wider community about the decision. The response was noticeably positive; people echoed many of the same concerns about Con Con we had shared. To be specific, yruu@uua.org received 47 emails directly praising the decision, as well as 25 people who wrote simply "to support the Youth Office" without commenting either way on the decision. Positive comments primarily came from former Youth Office staff, youth advisors, and religious educators, though 7 youth also wrote to us agreeing with the decision. We sincerely appreciate that support. We also received email from 11 people criticizing the decision, 5 of whom were youth. We also learned of a number of conversations going on in online communities about the decision (though we could not possibly have followed all such conversations.).

While there were a number of good questions and points raised in the critical responses, we were disappointed and deeply hurt to see a number of personal attacks on specific Youth Office members or against the Youth Office as a whole. It is worth noting that some members of the Youth Office were targeted for attacks more than others. There are people who contacted individual staff members and made threatening remarks about trying to get us fired, or confronting us about the decision in person - this is beyond inappropriate and borders on harassment. While we understand that some people cared deeply about Con Con, we feel that our decision should not have warranted calling the Youth Office staff "evil" or "fascists" or suggesting we had malicious or hidden intent in the decision. And even if some felt convinced that such accusations were true, we would have hoped that those people would have chosen to "confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love," rather than hostility.

Fortunately, most of the criticism was in good faith, and we feel that some of the good questions that were raised deserve to be answered. So we have tried to summarized the major feedback we have heard about the decision, and try to answer each question as best we can.

Who really made this decision?

There seems to be some confusion about who made the decision. The decision was made by a very strong consensus of the current Youth Office staff (Jesse Jaeger, Betty Jeanne Rueters-Ward, Brian Kuzma, and Ethan Field). The idea of taking Con Con off of the Youth Office's plate had been around for over a year beforehand, and had the support of the recent previous YPSs Jason Lydon and Megan Selby. Contrary to some theories, it was not the result of the Youth Programs Director 'strong-arming' the rest of the staff into it. The decision was not made by the UUA Administration (the President and Vice-Presidents) and forced upon the Youth Office. The Youth Office made the decision, asked for the support of the administration, and then made the announcement.

After the decision was made, the YRUU Steering Committee came to consensus that even though they strongly disagree with the way the decision was made and presented to them, they agree with many of the points we made, and ultimately agreed with and supported the decision to end Con Con as it has been known.

Why was this decision really made?

There seem to be a lot of theories out there about why the decision was "really" made... which is a little confusing to us, since we worked very hard to explain our thoughts and reasoning as carefully and as transparently as we could in the original announcement. There also seems to be a lot of misinterpretation of that original statement. Specifically, a considerable amount of attention has been paid to anti-racism and anti-oppression efforts in YRUU. While we consider this work important, it is just as important to us as youth leadership training, resource development, Synapse, and supporting YRUU's Youth Council and Steering Committee… and we said as much in the original announcement! Statements like "Con Con was cancelled so they could do more AR programming," are simply misleading and inaccurate.

It's possible that people chose to focus on AR/AO work because that programming is somewhat controversial, and not always well done. All we can say is that we understand that like any relatively new program, the way we do AR/AO work in YRUU is constantly developing and improving, and it's definitely not perfect. But we prefer to continue to improve our efforts at including and supporting as many people as possible in the YRUU community, by integrating anti-oppression awareness across all our programming, rather than abandoning them because the programs are not yet ideal. We always welcome your comments and suggestions for improvement.

So to sum up the entire Con Con decision again: At the heart of the Con Con decision was staff time. We lost a staff member. We needed to cut something - not money-wise, but time-wise. We cut back our time in a number of different areas… but looking at all the things we do, Con Con took up lots of time, didn't benefit many youth, and wasn't that healthy of a community to begin with (including, but not limited to, safety around oppression issues.) We asked the YRUU leadership to come up with some solutions, and when there was no definitive response, we acted on our own. And that's really what happened.

The Youth Office can't make this decision, only Youth Council can. Con Con is in the YRUU by-laws. The decision is illegal.

We all sincerely had hoped that the YRUU leadership would come up with a solution to this problem. We tried raising the issue, and nothing was done. The difficulty is that while the Youth Office is responsible for supporting the YRUU leadership and for supporting their decisions, they're only one of many constituencies we support. We're also responsible for supporting non-YRUU youth in congregations without YRUU, youth advisors, religious educators, youth leadership trainers, etc. None of those groups, including the YRUU leadership, have exclusive decision-making power about what we do.

Of course, there's no way we could do everything that all of those different groups want, and so like any staff group, we have to prioritize our work. We already spend a lot of time supporting YRUU programming (Youth Council, Steering Committee, resources and training for YRUU groups, and follow-up on Youth Council Resolutions). We needed time to support other forms of Youth Ministry. We hope that you'll agree that since we work on Youth Programming all day, every day, we need to have some degree of autonomy in deciding how we spend our limited office time.

Regarding the YRUU by-laws: There are quite a number of current practices in YRUU which are inconsistent with the by-laws. There is widespread agreement among the leadership that the bylaws need to be updated, and work is already underway which will help that process along. And as we mentioned above, the Youth Office is also accountable to the UUA bylaws, which require that the work we do ultimately serves UU congregations. Since we are employed by the Association of Congregations, we need to serve them. If YRUU's leadership funded, staffed, planned, and ran Con Con all by themselves, then the YRUU by-laws would have absolute control over Con Con, and this decision would never have even come up.

(Also in terms of legality: Since YRUU is not a separately incorporated organization from the UUA, its bylaws don't have any legal status which is binding on the employees of the Association. We approach our relationship with YRUU as a sacred, covenanted relationship, rather than a legalistic one.)

There are also significant signs that Con Con was dying on its own. Attendance was way down. Sites were becoming too expensive. There were almost no applications for staff positions. The community itself was increasingly unhealthy. And most of all, the YRUU leadership didn't seem to be actively interested in addressing the problems when these issues were brought to them. We didn't want to be left as the last group of people working harder and harder to prop up a dying institution that (for the reasons we mention in the original announcement) just didn't seem worth saving to any but a handful of people.

Then why didn't the Youth Office just ask YRUU to plan and run its own Con Con?

We actually explored different way that could happen. Unfortunately, in terms of legal liability, the UUA (and hence the Youth Office) is ultimately responsible if something really terrible happens at Con Con, which means that we need to have a certain degree of oversight to ensure that terrible things don't happen, or that they are dealt with appropriately when they do happen. Also, as we mentioned, even though the YRUU leadership seemed to enjoy having Con Con as long as it was provided to them, there didn't seem to be much enthusiasm for taking on the logistical support needed to make it happen. If neither the YRUU governance nor the Youth Office was able to or interested in fixing Con Con's problems, it just didn't make sense to continue with it.

This decision is very disempowering to youth. Does this represent a breakdown in trust between the Youth Office and YRUU leadership?

As we said, we wish this could have happened some other way. In a way, the relationship between the Youth Office and the YRUU leadership is like the relationship between a good youth advisor and a congregational youth group. A good youth advisor encourages youth to direct their own activities, to make mistakes along the way and learn from them, and to help youth find their voice in the congregation. However, a youth advisor reserves the right (1) to stop any activity that seems unsafe, (2) to veto any activity that could become a huge financial disaster, and (3) to have final say over how the advisor's own limited volunteer/staff time will be spent. The youth group might be unhappy about a particular decision and feel that it's unfair, but if the advisor is conscientious and judicious about when she/he/ze uses that veto power, in the end, it probably will be the best thing for the whole group. We feel the same way about our role in the Con Con decision: It was unsafe, financially disastrous, and prevented us from doing better things with our staff time.

In terms of greater issues of the relationship between the YRUU leadership and the Youth Office, there is currently a larger conversation going on in the Association about Youth Ministry. The Youth Office, the YRUU leadership, and many other stakeholders are involved in that conversation. One major part of that conversation is that YRUU and UUA administration need to define an authority structure that respects the rightful role of institutional youth and adult leadership at the same time that it supports the growth and empowerment of all UU youth. We hope that greater clarity around the relationship or the Youth Office to YRUU will come from this ongoing conversation.

Con Con is the continental Community. It's the natural continental equivalent to congregational youth groups and district/regional conferences/rallies.

This is an excellent and important point, and it's one of the reasons we struggled with the decision so much. However, there are some major ways in which Con Con was not the equivalent of local or district/regional gatherings. For instance, if the average youth group is 10-20 youth, and the average con/rally is 100 or so, then we would expect Con Con registration to be at 500-1000 youth! But it never was. This is likely due to economic accessibility, summer jobs, distance to travel. Also, there was considerably less advisor support at Con Con than there is at the smaller levels. And as we've said many times, the community itself was not healthy.

Many youth who attended Con Con were not at all involved on a congregational level, and might or might not have been involved on a district/regional level. Given the difficulty of paying for and getting to Con Con, we would rather figure out a way to help local congregations better support and welcome youth on a regular basis - rather than the Youth Office providing a very expensive one week per year for the youth who don't feel like they have their needs met by congregations.

We also found that the "continental community" often functioned like a "country club". Those who knew about or who could afford to go to Con Con got personal access to the Youth Office staff and to many of the youth and adults in continental leadership. Youth who attend Con Con have historically gotten recruited an selected more often for leadership and training positions… we feel like this has been an irresponsible and classist way of encouraging youth leadership. We now feel like it would be better to try to tap in to youth who are superstars in their congregational or district/regional youth community, rather than to keep drawing people from the same self-perpetuating group.

Will there ever be another Con Con?

We are not closed to the idea that there may one day be another continental conference similar to Con Con. Right now, we just don't have the staff, and there are so many things we do or could do that would serve so many more UU youth than Con Con did. Also, since attempts at making Con Con more healthy failed, there was a certain need to end Con Con as it has been known, and anything new that comes in the future would need to have a different name so that people would not mistake one for the other.

One possibility we have thought about is an open-registration Continental Youth Leadership Training: A week long, like Con Con. We could bring trainers from our Chrysalis training program to do two workshops a day (morning and afternoon), and then worship in the evening. Participants would leave the week having been trained in two different aspects of youth ministry. Since there would be a tangible training aspect to it, we'd expect more congregations to offer financial assistance for youth leaders to attend, and since there would be options for advisor training, we'd expect more adult participation.

General Assembly Youth Caucus is much more expensive, classist, etc. than Con Con - why don't you end your support for that?

There are some big differences between Con Con and Youth Caucus. The biggest is that since GA will continue to happen whether we support it or not, and youth will continue to attend, we don't really have the option to stop 'supporting' it. We've also taken some steps in the past few years to improve the way Youth Caucus happens, which have met with great success. The scholarship base for Youth Caucus is much bigger (we had over $7000 in donations for GA scholarships this year) and congregations are more likely to help support a youth to go to GA than to Con Con. It's for this reason that Youth Caucus registration has been at 400 and rising for the past few years (over 700 in Boston!) compared to Con Con which has struggled for the past few years even to reach 100.

Also, GA is an opportunity for youth to participate in the leadership of the denomination. Youth can serve as delegates from their congregation, and vote on the assembly floor. In 2003, GA approved "Prison Reform" as its Study-Action Issue largely due to a concerted effort from the Youth and Young Adult Caucuses. There are also multigenerational workshops and lectures youth can attend to further their involvement with the denomination. Con Con was more or less disconnected from the rest of UUism, and was increasingly just becoming a YRUU summer camp. While summer camps are fun and relaxing for their participants, they shouldn't be taking up such a disproportionate amount of UUA staff time.

Other UU summer camps (SUUSI, Star Island, etc) also have some of the same issues as Con Con; why did you tell people to go there?

We wrote our original letter to a wide audience. It's not that we were recommending or not recommending going to other UU summer camps, merely that those options exist for UU youth who are looking for a summer camp experience and who can afford it. The difference is that those conferences are planned by groups whose work centers exclusively around planning those conferences, and not by us, who have a much broader mandate to serve youth in congregations.

Con Con was the only space of its kind for worship and spirituality.

This is the thing that hurts us the most about this decision. All four of the current Youth Office staff members attended Con Con at one time or another before we worked in the Youth Office, and knew the deep spiritual connections and moving worship that happened there. We're also aware that this is one of the few ways that what happened at Con Con trickled back down to the district/regional and congregational levels - people often shared songs and worship ideas with their friends back home.

On the other hand, when YRUU's version of Con Con was created in the early 1980s, the YRUU Social Justice Conference did not exist, and GA Youth Caucus was tiny. In the last three years, four times as many youth attended worship at GA or YSJC than attended a Con Con worship. Also, when Con Con was created, there were no Spirituality Development Conferences available at a district/regional level; now there are. Those conferences are designed to support and improve attendees ability to create meaningful and inclusive worship, and reach a wider audience than Con Con. In addition to training, the Youth Office offers several resources which assist with worship creation (Deep Fun, The YRUU Songbook, Blessing to All Beings, Planning a Youth Sunday, the worship section of How to Be a Con Artist). And, we're currently working on a comprehensive Youth Worship Manual which should be out in a little over a year. Rather than offering a worship experience in one place that only a few people can make it to, we're trying to provide resources for youth worship that anyone can access.

Why does this web site only post one side of the story? Why don't you post any of the comments you've gotten?

This posting here is an attempt to address some of the issues raised. Unfortunately, we don't have the technical ability to create or maintain a message board that would hold everyone's opinion. Posting them individually would take so much time that it would defeat the purpose of making the decision in the first place (saving staff time)… and trying to engage in a set of individual debates about these issues would take forever.

Our position is that this UUA-hosted website is the place for the institutional position. We shared our thoughts and feelings about the decision, and then we were silent and let the debate take place in the public square. There are many other people with online journals or blogs out there who have posted at great length about the subject; we feel that this is the appropriate balance. Now that things have quieted down, we're posting this follow up to try and answer some of the legitimate questions that have come up. At this point, however, we'd like to call this issue done, and move on. While we will continue to read every comment that comes to us, we will probably not respond to any further follow-up comments after this.

In faith,
The Sep 2004 - June 2005 Youth Office

Jesse Jaeger, Youth Programs Director
Brian Kuzma, YRUU Programs Specialist
Betty Jeanne Rueters-Ward, YRUU Programs Specialist
Ethan Field, Youth Office Assistant