Dear UUCC,
In August 2019, I joined the UUCC staff for the opportunity to experiment with ideas I had about building transformative spiritual community in congregational settings. I told Paige Getty and Maureen Harris my goal was to build community, not programs. For five years, it’s been an honor to be trusted to tend, grow, deepen, and nurture community with you, UUCC (and cultivate a few programs along the way).
Earlier this week, I submitted a resignation letter to your Board of Trustees. My time with you will come to an end on January 26, 2025.
In our shared ministry model, the work your staff and I do at UUCC is about relationships in service of our congregational mission, not limited by traditional understandings of job titles and program areas. While I’ve held different positions and my scope of accountability has shifted at UUCC, my work over the years has fundamentally remained the same. Thank you for letting me share meals and music, hang out with your kids, lead worship, attempt new ways of talking about and exercising stewardship, listen to your most tender and vulnerable stories, and explore varied understandings of our institutional identity and mission. Together, we practice community care, and we work toward individual and collective transformation.
Through my time at UUCC, I’ve deepened my own commitment to our shared values of interdependence, pluralism, generosity, justice, equity, and transformation—values that compel me to act radically and love boldly. I’ve clarified my own sense of calling to build transformative community wherever I go. The world we inhabit, broken by forces of capitalism, only wants us to exist as slivers of who we are. But in community, we are invited to live as our full spiritual, political, intellectual, emotional, social, physical selves, to be restored as whole, embodied people. To be known and seen and loved by a community as your whole, integrated self—that is our individual transformation. To know and see and love others wholly in community—that is our collective transformation.
So thank you, UUCC, for five transformative years. May your next five years be filled with awe & wonder, growth & transformation, freedom from the impulse to continue business as usual, courage to imagine a different way, and resolute purpose to dismantle systems of oppression within yourselves and this institution.
Onward,
Valerie Hsu
Executive Director
P.S. A note about timing. Why now? you may wonder. UUCC is currently in a transition period (learn more about interim ministry here), and this transition period is intentionally designed to handle big changes. In spring 2025, UUCC will embark on serious planning for the future: the transition team will hold house meetings for explicit discussions about this congregation’s future, conversations will begin in earnest about assembling a search committee and planning for the settled minister search process, the budgeting process and pledge drive will be conducted with the settled search in mind. I don’t need to be part of planning for a transition I’m not going to see through. I’m timing my departure for January 2025 so this congregation can be fully invested and focused in transition planning without my involvement.
A message from Laurie Coltri, Congregational President:
The Board learned of Valerie Hsu’s plans to leave UUCC this past Tuesday, November 12. We’re sad to see her go.
The board holds the responsibility for hiring the Executive Director. Toward that end, our first task is to convene a search team that will be charged to execute the search for a new Executive Director. Just as Valerie participated in the interim minister search, Rev. Lisa will participate in this one. We’re already hard at work on this and we promise to put forth our best efforts toward a swift, productive, and carefully implemented transition.
Valerie has been an integral part of congregational life at UUCC. Her presence has been highly visible, but the longer I am on the Board and the more experience I have, the more I notice other, less obvious ways that she has nurtured UUCC’s vibrancy and health. Her beautiful fingerprints are everywhere, from helping out on the OBIC board and Stewardship Council, to management of our financial accounts, to getting grants for UUCC, to helping to design pamphlets and continuing to serve our youth. And in other ways too numerous to recount here. Moreover, in recent months she has become a valued friend to me. I wish we had become friends sooner, and will miss her terribly.
Staff transitions are not uncommon during transitional periods. Valerie, like Rev. Getty before her, is choosing her leave-taking moment to be ideal for the health of our congregation. As we move through these transitions, it is important for all of us to be involved with our hands, feet, voices, minds, and hearts, rather than simply leaning on certain people in leadership. We are called to move into actively living our mission and values, and into the planning of our next steps — toward becoming a thriving, energetic, Beloved Community. And we are called toward becoming a congregation where all who share our values find fellowship, respite, compassion, and empowerment; and from which justice flows, as the spiritual says, like a mighty stream. As the interim period progresses, you will have opportunities to express yourself in this collective evolution of who we are. Please take them.
Please come speak to us at the Board Corner any Sunday, about this new transition, or about anything on your mind. And, when you do see Valerie, please thank her for her compassionate, energetic presence over the past five years.
In faith and love,
Laurie Coltri, on behalf of UUCC’s Board of Trustees
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