Letter from
the President
Beloveds,
Your UUA is a network of remarkable leaders dedicated to serving the covenant that lives at the root of our liberal and liberating faith. They do this in many ways including producing new resources like the Mosaic Hub for dismantling racism and oppression, and through new projects such as Threshold Conversations, an initiative to deepen our understanding and practice of religious education. Your UUA is also helping UUs engage with urgent calls for climate justice, reproductive justice, immigration justice, voting rights, LGBTQ justice, and more. We are proud of using UUA headquarters to provide shelter for migrant Haitian families and for working together with all of you to pass a business resolution that unflinchingly proclaims the embrace of transgender, nonbinary, and gender diverse people as a fundamental expression of UU religious values.
Together we are building a Unitarian Universalism that meets this moment. I couldn’t be prouder that our faith movement affirmed a new articulation of our shared values, with love at the center. Our pressing task now is to continue collectively living into those values—a task that requires all of us to bring our gifts forward in service of the whole.
Thank you for all that you dream, give, and do to support the missional work of your UUA.
Faithfully,
Sofía
UUA President
Profile of the UUA President
The Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt is the tenth president of the Unitarian Universalist Association. She was elected in June 2023. As president of the Association, she is responsible for administering staff and programs that serve its more than 1,000 member congregations. She also acts as principal spokesperson and minister-at-large for the UUA.
Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt’s twenty-year ministry has included serving as a parish minister, seminary professor, scholar and environmental ethicist, and public theologian. Rooted in her lived identities as a queer, multiracial, AfroLatine first-generation daughter of immigrants from Chile and Panamá, Rev. Dr. Betancourt has already helped Unitarian Universalism live further into its commitments to be a radically welcoming, counter-oppressive, pluralistic faith movement. In addition to her many years of service as Director of the UUA’s Office of Racial and Ethnic Concerns and on many denominational leadership bodies, she also has previous experience with the role of president—in early 2017 she was appointed interim co-president to finish a vacated term, making her the first woman to lead the Unitarian Universalist Association. She most recently served as Resident Scholar and Special Advisor on Justice and Equity at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.
Rev. Dr. Betancourt has contributed to the education of future faith leaders at Yale Divinity School, Starr King School for the Ministry, and Drew University Theological School, teaching courses on topics such as ministerial leadership, theologies, womanism and Earth justice, and combatting oppression. Her own scholarship focuses on environmental ethics of liberation in a womanist and Latina feminist frame. She holds Ph.D., M.A., and M.Phil. degrees in Religious Ethics and African American Studies from Yale University, an M.Div. from Starr King School for the Ministry, and a B.S. from Cornell University with a concentration in ethnobotany. Rev. Dr. Betancourt is the author of Ecowomanism at the Panamá Canal: Black Women, Labor, and Environmental Ethics (2022). She lives in the Washington, DC, area.