LREDA Fall Conference from 6-10th Nov 2024

BlanketFort Con: Cultivating Cozy Community Care

Join your fellow LREDA members for four days of radical rest, community care, and spiritual coziness!

The 2024 online Fall Conference invites you to join from home or create your own multiplatform experience by meeting up with a local in-person pod of fellow attendees.

Be part of our collective call for a Unitarian Universalism that supports the souls, minds, and bodies of our religious professionals. Build a blanket fort, and join us to both give and receive community care with religious educators worldwide.

Draft Schedule

Wed Nov 6

• Gathering:  8:30am PT, 9:30am MT, 10:30am CT, 11:30am ET
• Closing: 6pm PT,  7pm MT, 8pm CT, 9pm ET

• Gathering: 8:30 am PT, 9:30 am MT, 10:30 am CT, 11:30 am ET
• Closing: 6pm PT, 7pm MT, 8pm CT, 9pm ET

• Gathering 8:30 am PT, 9:30 am MT, 10:30am CT, 11:30am ET
• Closing: 6pm PT, 7pm MT, 8pm CT, 9pm ET

• Gathering: 8:30am PT, 9:30am MT, 10:30am CT, 11:30 am ET
• Closing: 6pm PT, 7pm MT, 8pm CT, 9pm ET

Sun Nov 10

• Gathering 12:30pm PT, 1:30pm MT, 2:30pm CT, 3:30pm ET
• Conference Close 5:30pm PT, 6:30pm MT, 7:30pm CT, 8:30pm ET

LREDA Fall Conference 2023: Make a Joyful Noise! Celebrate / Play / Resist

 Wed October 11th - Sun October 15th

UU religious education colleagues from across the continent joined us for our 2023 Fall Conference: Make A Joyful Noise! Celebrate / Play / Resist in Milwaukee, WI, from October 11th - 15th in downtown Milwaukee. 

We Celebrated the power of rest, play, and resistance through multi-platform worship, workshops, and identity programming that helped us engage with some of the most pressing issues in UU religious education today: creating spaces for meaningful & joyful connection, leading for anti-racism in majority-white spaces, and supporting LGBTQIA+ families & resisting anti-trans legislation. 

We offered curated rest & play spaces for IBPOC attendees, and trans attendees, respectively, while those with majority identities learned. Social and spiritual time together rounded out our annual conference, along with the UU Identity Renaissance Module offered immediately following the conference. 

Recorded conference content is available to attendees via email and in our Conference Facebook Group and Discord Channel.

October 12-16 2022

Content from last year's conference, including all presentations, worship services, and slides, are shared in the LREDA Member Resources Portal under 8th Principle Resources. To access this site you need to be a member of LREDA.

This conference was a deep dive into the work of the 8th Principle, grounded in Civil Rights History and included a visit to the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration

We had a great team of presenters and worship leaders. Our presenters were Dr. Paula Cole Jones and  Sheila Schuh. Rev. Denise Graves was our Spiritual Care Director, supporting our members through the conference. Beverly Horton and the Rev. Chris Long lead our worship services.

The conference content supported Religious Educators in their individual and congregational anti-racism and anti-oppression work. We engaged with strategies to dismantle white supremacy within our Unitarian Universalist spaces, and where our power lies to create a Unitarian Universalism where faith can be made real.

Religious Educators who are Black, Indigenous, and other members of the Global Majority were affirmed into a LREDA community of support, encouragement, and learning. 

White Religious Educators were challenged and stretched in their places of power and privilege.

Intentional space was made for people of all identities to process the feelings that arose during this conference. 

The LREDA Board committed to offering a conference that centered liberation, love and community care rooted in our Unitarian Universalist faith.

About the Legacy Museum

The conference included a visit to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, AL.

The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is situated on a site in Montgomery where Black people were forced to labor in bondage. Blocks from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America, the Legacy Museum is steps away from the rail station where tens of thousands of Black people were trafficked during the 19th century.