Our Regional Assembly Keynote Comes Into Focus! - Archived

We are just thrilled that so many wonderful people are coming together in-person and online for Rising Resilient, our 2026 Regional Assembly. With programs, worship, and activities for all ages, this is going to be a nourishing event—one that bolsters us as we proclaim, and seek to live by, our human interconnectedness and sacredness.

You may have picked up that our Pacific Western Regional Assembly, April 10-12, is going to be fully multiplatform. But you may not know how much all of our presenters and our tech team are doing to make your online participation be engaging, community-building, and joyous!

You can join our Regional Assembly from anywhere with a laptop, tablet, or phone plus an internet connection. With the online platform Whova and the online service Zoom, we’ll be livestreaming and making space for community chats.

Presenting the Keynote of the Regional Assembly is Sam Ames, a life-long UU, attorney, and rabblerouser for civil rights. They will speak on this:

During the most difficult moments in human history, those clinging to unsteady seats of power have often discovered the salience of a scapegoat. Chief among them this time around have been immigrants, Muslim and/or SWANA Americans, and transgender people. The headlines are brutal, and the cruelty appears to be the point. Keeping up with the attacks on the most disenfranchised members of our community can feel like an impossible pull between staying responsibly informed and staying spiritually afloat.

Sam Ames, a civil rights attorney who has been fighting for LGBTQI+ equality for over 15 years, will join us on the final night of Regional Assembly to share a few lessons from the trans community about how to weather these cycles of panic and exhaustion. We will look honestly at the landscape around us: court decisions that shape our rights, policies that threaten vulnerable communities, and the ways public narratives can amplify fear. But we will also root ourselves in something older and more profound—that state systems have never been the source of our worth and dignity. Love has.

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It will be so good to have you with us as we Rise Resilient together.

Your PWR Regional Assembly Circle: Rev. Sunshine Jeremiah Wolfe, Ritoo Chaturveti, Libby Fitzgerald, Amy Kent, Janet Lopes, Hara Madera, Rev. Sarah Gibb Millspaugh, and Ramon Urbano