Richard S. Scobie
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"To Advance Justice" is the personal memoir of Richard Scobie''s years of leadership at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. In it, he describes his efforts to build this small, value-based organization into an effective force for human rights during a period of rapid social change in the United States and the world. In candid detail he recalls the behind-the-scenes struggles, organizational and interpersonal, to make UUSC live up to its mission: "to advance justice." The story moves from the board room in Boston to the rural villages of El Salvador, Eritrea and the Philippines, from meetings in local churches in middle America to the halls of Congress. It encompasses the intellectual challenges of planning and management, and the emotional stress of leadership in the face of conflict, illness, and mortality. This book is a case study of how one religiously motivated organization has tried to be a force for positive social change, written from the perspective of a person who played a major role in the process. It will be valuable reading for students of denominational history, practitioners of non-profit management, people with an interest in the social issues that rocked the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, and people wanting to make a more nearly just world.
Richard Scobie led the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee for twenty-seven years, from 1972 through 1998. Under his direction the UUSC worked to advance justice by defending human rights and promoting humane solutions to social problems worldwide, from the war zones of Central America, Africa and Asia, to America''s broken systems of criminal justice and child welfare. Dr. Scobie earned an A.B. at Dartmouth College, an M.S.W. at the University of Pittsburgh, and a Ph.D. at the Florence Heller School for Advanced Studies in Social Welfare at Brandeis University. He is recipient of the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Association of Social Workers (MA Chapter), and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Meadville/Lombard School of Theology. He is married to Jill Hirst Scobie, has six children and five grandchildren, and lives in Waltham, Massachusetts.
In my last talk for the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) I reflected on the adventures I had had thanks to this work. Without UUSC, I pondered "I would not have fallen down that flight of stair in Bombay and learned first hand the noises, smells and routines of an Indian hospital. Without UUSC I probably wouldn''t have spent the night in a solitary confinement cell in Massachusetts'' Walpole prison. Without UUSC I wouldn''t have been detained for 16 hours by the Philippine army in the forest of Southern Luzon. Without UUSC I wouldn''t have sat in the firelight with groups of Eritrean fighters, singing freedom songs while Ethiopian tracer bullets streaked overhead. Without UUSC I wouldn''t have met at midnight with Salvadoran guerillas, listening by kerosene lamp to the distant explosions while they spoke of their hopes for a better future. Without UUSC I would never have met Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Dalai Lama, or Oscar Arias, or traveled with Rigoberta Menchu. Neither, for that matter, would I have met the Boston Strangler, or traveled with goats or slept with camels, and lizards or on the airfield tarmac at Mazatlan. What a fantastic life with UUSC."
With these memories in mind, I began to write this book. The book began simply enough, with my desire to leave a record of my twenty-seven years at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, between 1972 and 1998. As the narrative evolved I realized that it had become many different things which might be of interest to many different groups of readers. It is, to begin with, the story of a value based non-profit organization as it struggled and grew during a quarter century. It is also the story of one social worker''s efforts to lead a small, troubled organization and build it into an effective instrument for social justice. It is a case study of the professional problems of managing a growing organization in an ever-shifting political, economic and cultural environment. It includes accounts of particular programs that addressed some of the most critical social issues of the time, along with some analysis of the context in which they took place. And finally, it is the personal story of my work to express my values and my ambitions through this unique organization.
In writing this, I have assembled a wide variety of materials - printed newsletters and reports, memos and meeting minutes, tape recordings and personal journals. But I don''t pretend that it is a work of scholarly research. My primary source of information is my own memory, and, as most good historians have pointed out, human memory is notoriously unreliable. There are certainly many errors of fact and sequence in this narrative that could be challenged and corrected. People who have participated in the events described here may have quite different recollections. Where I have ascribed motives to individuals or inferred a causative relationship between actions and subsequent happenings I realize that I may be open to challenge. Life is complex and this is essentially a personal memoir. I''ve tried, with a minimum of defensiveness or self-deception, to recall and record how things seemed to me as a central player in the story.
