Dale Anderson

Sarasota, Florida, Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota 

Dale Anderson is a retired physician executive and healthcare consultant who served as the President of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota (Florida) from 2019 to 2022. He was instrumental in instituting a Racial Justice Program for the UU Church of Sarasota in 2018 and created the church’s Racial Justice Coordination Team. The team assisted the congregation in adopting the UU 8th Principle and annually presented a set of racial justice initiatives for board approval.

He serves as a UU representative to the Manasota Antiracism Coalition and the Sarasota Remembrance Project, a local coalition that brought a lynching memorial to Sarasota (placed on the UU campus). Since 2017, Dale has been speaking to various Florida organizations about fascism and the threat to our democracy. In 2022, he launched a website, choosedemocracynow.org, in support of his concerns for our democratic future.

Dale graduated from Northwestern University Medical School, interned at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, and practiced Internal and Emergency Medicine with a large group practice in Ames, Iowa. After completing a mid-career MBA at Iowa State University, he served as a senior physician executive with large hospital systems in Albuquerque and Columbus, Ohio. He completed his professional career with a Miami-based healthcare strategy consulting firm.

Dale lives with his wife, Mary Montgomery, in Sarasota. He has three grown children and multiple grandchildren. He is currently the President of the Sarasota Concert Association and sits on the board of the WSLR+ Fogartyville Community Media and Arts Center, an NFP that operates a low-power radio station in Sarasota.

Teresa DeSousa

West Orange, New Jersey, UU Congregation at Montclair

Teresa became a Unitarian Universalist in 2003 and is a member of the UU Congregation in Montclair, NJ. She has served her congregation in many capacities, first in governance and, most recently, in the social justice area. Most notably, she served on the Board of Trustees for seven years, including a term as President from 2011-2014. She has served and is serving a second term on the congregation’s Nominating and Leadership Development Committee. She was one of the original facilitators of the congregation’s Harvest the Power program. In 2016, she led the effort to revitalize her congregation’s social justice ministry, serving as co-facilitator of the congregation’s Social Justice Coalition. She is currently a leader of the congregation’s voter rights task force.

Teresa has been a member of the UUSJ’s Democracy Action Team for several years and strongly believes in the power of our faith community’s voice in national discourse.

Teresa is a New Jersey native living in West Orange, NJ. She received her undergraduate degree in Sociology and History from the University of Pittsburgh and her graduate degree in Human Resource Management from LaRoche College, also in Pittsburgh. She works as a human resources manager at a law firm in New York City. She also owns a dog daycare and boarding business with a partner. Teresa handles the administrative side of the business. Reading, traveling, and the New York Yankees are her passions.

Rev. Latifah Griffin

North Palm Beach, Florida, First UU Congregations of the Palm Beaches

Rev. Latifah Griffin was raised in Chester, PA, and works as a therapist and minister.  She is a graduate of Lancaster Theological Seminary with a Master’s Degree in Divinity, adding to her Master’s Degree from Neumann University in Pastoral Care and Counseling. Her personal mission is to enlighten others about our interconnectedness as humans. 

Latifah was baptized in the Baptist tradition as a teenager. After a long discernment process, she found a new spiritual community in the Unitarian Universalist tradition in 2018 as a member of the First Unitarian Church of Wilmington.  She was the Intern Minister at the Unitarian Society of Germantown for the 2020-22 church years and then served as Interim Director of Spiritual Development for 2022-23.  Latifah began her ministry with UUPB in 2023; with her ministry comes many historic firsts – she is the first openly queer woman and the first woman of color to serve the congregation. She enjoys relaxing, spending time with her family, reading, learning new things, and trying new foods. 

Vonna Heaton

Rockville, Maryland, River Road UU Congregation

Vonna is a passionate and lifelong student and practitioner of Unitarian Universalist principles. She became a Unitarian Universalist, joined River Road UU Congregation in 2013, and put her energy and passion to use by serving with several groups, including the Racial Justice Task Force, Action in Montgomery core team, Welcome Team, and Social Justice Review and Ministry Teams. She has also been nurtured by many small group fellowships, including Beloved Conversations, Spirit Journey, Inquirers, and Women’s Groups. Vonna implemented the inaugural Actions for Justice Racial Justice Pathway to enhance and positively impact national voter outreach.

Vonna also serves on the Board of a non-profit that is reshaping the local food system by reducing barriers to accessing nutrient-dense fresh produce for those experiencing food insecurity in our communities, promoting improved health outcomes through Food Is Medicine programs for low-income residents at risk of chronic diet-related diseases, and supporting local small-scale produce farmers through fair-price purchase programs.

Before joining the ranks of the joyfully retired persons, Vonna’s first career was as a math teacher, and then 34 years as a federal employee. She earned many distinctions, including the National Intelligence Superior Service Medal and the Presidential Meritorious Rank Award. She is most proud of her Agency-level employee nominated Mentor of the Year and Supervisor of the Year Awards. Vonna and her husband, Ed, live just west of Rockville, MD. Her life has been graced by the love of family, including her identical twin sister Valri, and she is the proud aunt to nieces and nephews in whose lives she engages on a regular and symbiotically supportive basis. She and Ed are also parents to Ed’s daughter, Sarah, and son, Tony, and Tony’s daughter, Autumn Moon. She enjoys hiking and exploring new plant-based recipes.

Meleah Houseknecht

Minneapolis, Minnesota, First Universalist Church of Minneapolis

Meleah (she/her/hers) is the founder and owner of Emergence Consulting, which provides added capacity to nonprofit clients through organizational development, project strategy and management, meeting and event design, facilitation, and coaching on inclusive stakeholder engagement to advance more just, and resilient environmental policy, planning, and decision-making. Most recently, she served as the director of policy and systems change for Environmental Initiative, where for nine years, she led the organization’s work to engage diverse stakeholder perspectives on behalf of state and local government and to build capacity in the environmental field to collaboratively address systemic and complex environmental problems through the lens of racial, cultural, and social equity.

Meleah holds a master’s degree in environmental management from the Yale School of the Environment and has nearly 20 years of experience engaging stakeholders in environmental policy development and implementation. In 2021, she also began following her call to Unitarian Universalist ministry and is currently a student at United Theological Seminary in Unitarian Universalist studies and social transformation. She originally hails from West Virginia but has happily settled in South Minneapolis. She enjoys walking and biking to local restaurants, coffee shops, and extraordinary parks, sometimes with her spouse and two young children and sometimes blissfully alone. When not consulting, reading radical theology, or parenting, Meleah looks for ways to support neighbors and members of her congregation in expressing their values through social justice action as co-chair of the Faithful Action Council at First Universalist Church of Minneapolis.

Patricia Marr

Lakewood, California, Unitarian Universalist Church of Long Beach

Patricia Marr has been a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Long Beach, California (UUCLB), for 30+ years. She is retired from court reporting and enjoys spending time with her spouse, daughters, their spouses, and grandchildren.

Pat’s extensive social justice volunteer work experience includes founding a local community organizing project with the PICO National Network and working for that non-profit for a decade. She served on its board and recently assisted in its merger with another non-profit. She also served a term on the board of LA Voice, a community organizing group in Los Angeles.

She was the Service Project Coordinator for the 2004 UUA General Assembly, which included a public action event with city officials to establish the first year-round homeless shelter in Long Beach. She has co-organized numerous candidate forums, ballot proposition informational events, and in-person and Zoom visits to the offices of elected representatives in city, state, and federal offices. She joined the UUSJ Democracy Action Team several years ago and has enjoyed working with that team. She is passionate about voting rights, election integrity, and democracy legislation, and she knows voting rights are the foundation on which we stand to accomplish all our social justice goals.

Pat is also serving on the board of the Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry of California.

Jean Pierce

Beaverton, Oregon

Jean has been active in Social Justice in various capacities. In 2008, she retired after 34 years as a professor of educational psychology. As an educator, she knew she was making a difference in the lives of teachers and their students; this passion has continued. For over 15 years, as social justice chair of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois, she helped coordinate programs focused on Education, Direct Action, and Monetary Support for local, national, and international causes.  

For ten years, Jean served as chair of the League of Women Voters of Illinois Issues and Advocacy Committee, responsible for identifying and tracking legislation, educating the public, and recommending advocacy for members and the public to shape public policy. She has also served on the Midwest Educational Research Association Boards, Northern Illinois Jobs with Justice, and the Jane Adeny Memorial Secondary School for girls in rural Kenya. 

Jean recently moved to Portland, Oregon, where she anticipates making new connections with fellow UUs and League members. 

Kim Rebecca-Murray

Parker, Colorado, Prairie Unitarian Universalist Church

Raised in Chicago, Kim graduated from the University of Illinois in Rhetoric and earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Miami University of Ohio. Between her undergraduate and postgraduate work, Kim served in the Peace Corps in Honduras, where she taught fish farming to small, isolated, impoverished mountain communities to help increase protein intake in the local diet.

Active in social justice since the age of nine, Kim was present during demonstrations in Skokie, IL (protesting Nazis); she built and lived in anti-apartheid “shanty towns” at the University of IL; she was first employed as a legal advocate for survivors of domestic violence; she taught composition, ESL, and literature at inner city colleges in Louisiana and Chicago as an adjunct professor; and much more.

Kim was raised Jewish but practiced no religion as a young adult. Upon meeting her future husband, Kim explored several religions and settled on UUism, which she has been engaged with for over 30 years. She and her husband, an art activist, attend Prairie Unitarian Universalist Church in Parker, Colorado, where she has served as co-chair of the social justice committee, board secretary, and board president. As a member of Prairie, Kim led several activist initiatives, including representation at the Women’s March, the March for Our Lives, and countless demonstrations in the summer of 2020 in response to the murders of George Floyd and Elijah McClain.

Kim and her husband live in Colorado, where they enjoy their surroundings, zoo of pets, and visits from their children and grandchildren.

Eliseo Santana Jr.

Clearwater, Florida, UU of Clearwater

Eliseo has been a UU Clearwater Social Justice Council member for over 20 years (even before becoming a congregation member). His advocacy, witnessing, lobbying, and organizing for social justice have been on numerous issues continuously throughout his life. One of his UU community passions is to help make our faith more culturally welcoming to non-traditional UU populations. This flows from his professional experience, usually and often the first and only person of color in the room.

A board member and founder of Alianza 21 (a non-profit), a member of the steering board for La Mesa Boricua, past vice-president of League of Women Voters NPC, and a member of more than thirty local social justice organizations, Eliseo’s superpower is connecting people. He serves the community as Alianza’s Environmental and Clean Energy Gulf Coast Region Manager. One of the main objectives is to prepare the Hispanic community to be more resilient in experiencing extreme adverse weather conditions like hurricanes.

Recently, he served as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) director for Florida and on the LULAC national board. LULAC is the oldest and largest Hispanic member organization in the USA, 95 years old, with +138,000 members.

Eliseo believes in making fundamental changes from within institutions and has been highly influential in that approach.

Dan Schneider

Cincinnati, Ohio, First Unitarian Church of Cincinnati

Dan grew up on a small farm in west central Ohio and was the first person in his family to attend college. He graduated from Wittenberg University and received a Master of Science in Teaching from Drake University, a Master of Arts from Ohio State University, and a graduate certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) from the University of Cincinnati. Dan served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and taught American history as a teaching associate at Ohio State University. He worked for fifteen years for Jobs for Cincinnati Graduates, a school-to-work program for high school seniors, and for sixteen years, he was an Academic Director of TRIO programs at the University of Cincinnati Clermont College.

Dan and his wife attend the First Unitarian Church of Cincinnati. Dan served as Co-Chair of the Social Justice Committee for four years and as Board Secretary and President. He also served as Board Co-Chair of Unitarian Universalist Justice Ohio and has served many years on the board of the Cincinnati Interfaith Workers Center. Dan volunteered ten years as an ESL teacher at Santa Maria Community Services.

Dan serves as President of the Unitarian Universalist Council of Greater Cincinnati. During his presidency, the UU Council has established anti-racism circles, recognized and encouraged the creation of a BLUU (Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism) Haven group in Greater Cincinnati, and participated in a Walk to Defeat ALS in memory of DOTA (Documented Official Tuskegee Airmen) Leslie Edwards, Jr., a lifelong Unitarian Universalist. Dan lives in Cincinnati with his wife Janet and their cats. They have two sons, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson. Dan enjoys attending the Reds and Bengals games.

Sandra Wilmore

Springfield, Virginia

Sandra Mitchell Wilmore grew up in the segregated South. Those years inform her sense of justice, the need for change, and her commitment to constant evolution toward a better society. Her youth also informed her deep respect for the power of the law–Sandra’s profession. Sandra lives in Springfield, Virginia.

For ten years, Sandra was an attorney with the civil rights firm of Relman & Colfax, PLLC, Washington, DC, advising creditors and other businesses of their compliance obligations under fair lending, consumer credit, and privacy laws and litigation against lenders alleged to have violated laws against credit and housing discrimination. Before that, she was an attorney in the Bureau of Consumer Protection, Federal Trade Commission for thirty-two years, enforcing the federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act, Truth in Lending Act, Fair Credit Reporting Act, Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and Federal Trade Commission Act (prohibiting unfair and deceptive practices) as to lenders and others subject to the jurisdiction of the FTC.