AEU Weekly Update: Thursday, Nov 16, 2023

Dear Members,

A lot has changed in the last few months as the officers and Board continue to discern the structures that will best promote the collaboration, transformation, and regeneration required by the voting results of this summer’s Assembly. One question heard in many of our spaces is:

How will this new structure promote collaboration? 

President Khandra Sears’ November letter begins to answer this question:

“Representative directors have been invited into regional teams tasked with learning, collaborating, and visioning to bring collective aspirations to the full board. Board members are the regional teams; the regional teams are incubators for the ideas that will shape the future of the AEU. This model firmly grounds the board’s work and the AEU’s future in our member societies by relying on self-organizing society representation. …  Ideas have a better chance to mature and thrive in a regional team before they are brought to the board where they can be leveraged to shape our future.”

In addition to regional teams where ideas can be incubated, the roadmap includes an investment for increasing our collective capacity and growing leadership skills across the movement. The pilot Transformative Leadership Cohort is currently underway, whose purpose is to offer opportunities for leadership to grow their own skills and build a cohesive, cross-institutional team to support the AEU transition. If this pilot is successful, a second cohort of leaders will be invited to participate in early 2024.

This investment in leadership promotes the kind of imagination, collaborative creativity, and participation we need to build a vision for the future of our movement. As we expand our collective skill sets, we will all become better equipped to steward the American Ethical Union through this period of change — together. We are excited about the work ahead of us, and we hope you are, too. 

For further reading, visit November’s Letter from the President and the announcement of the Transformative Leadership Cohort.

Featured Board Member of the Week 

Each week, we will introduce a new Board member so you can get to know them and connect with our new leadership.

Please meet Julia Julstrom-Agoyo (she/her), the new Board Director representing the Future of Ethical Societies (FES), members of Ethical Societies who are aged 18-35.

Julia Julstrom-Agoyo

Julia grew up attending the Ethical Society of Chicago since age six and stayed involved in Ethical Culture through the Future of Ethical Societies (FES). For the last few years, she has been serving as the FES representative for the AEU Board and the AHA Youth Representative to the UN.

Julia’s background has been primarily in the immigrant nonprofit services sector, with several stints in international human rights field research. She is passionate about human rights, conflict transformation, and restorative justice, and she strives to make a positive impact through research, advocacy, and policy reform. Julia recently obtained her Master’s in global policy/human rights and is looking for her next role. 

Julia has the most fun when she’s around people, so she likes to spend time with family and friends, and also strangers (she may also be the only New Yorker who enjoys walking through Times Square). She also enjoys yoga and pilates, and sometimes, cooking and baking. 

Julia believes the AEU has the potential to play a stronger role in social activism and political advocacy at a national level and would like to help the organization do so. She also believes in the power of intergenerational spaces and is happy to be part of that space within the AEU leadership.

Julia sees her personal and professional history of activism as helping kickstart the new phase of our Ethical Action Team (lovingly named The Cat Herders). She also has lots of experience in cross-cultural communication and is hoping to use that skill to support the use of Restorative Justice practices within the AEU. 

In community, 

Khandra, Jé, Liz, and Anya

Reach us at PresidentandVP@aeu.org.