Our Team
Rev. Ashley DeTar Birt
is the Program Manager for New York Unitarian Universalist Justice and an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). She obtained her Masters of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary, an MA in Theater Arts from the University of Pittsburgh, and a BA in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. During her time at Union Theological Seminary, she received the Malcolm Boyd Veritas Award which recognizes promise for the work of social justice on behalf of the LGBTQ community. She was named one of 2016's New Faces of Ministry through The Center for Faith and Service. She currently serves on the Racial Equity Advocacy Committee and has previously served on the Disparities Experienced by Black Women and Girls Task Force for the PC(USA). An outspoken advocate for youth ministry and social justice, Ashley serves as the Co-Moderator of the Board of Directors for More Light Presbyterians and has written for the NEXT Church blog, Believe Out Loud, and the Progressive Youth Ministry Blog on Patheos. She lives in the Bronx, NY with her wife, Rev. Emily DeTar Birt, on Munsee Lenape land.
Contact at ashley@jubileepractice.org
Rick Ufford-Chase
serves as an Institutional Advancement Officer for Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary, supporting curriculum development and helping to develop a grassroots fundraising strategy. He has worked for nearly four decades on designing transformational experiential education programs and organizing for social and environmental justice. Rick served as the Director of BorderLinks in the AZ/Sonora borderlands, as the first full-time Director of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, and as Co-Director of Stony Point Conference Center with his wife Kitty. He was the Moderator of the 216th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), and is the author of Faithful Resistance: Gospel Visions for the Church in a Time of Empire. Rick and Kitty live on traditional Abenaki lands in the Missisquoi River Basin in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.
Contact at rick@jubileepractice.org
Primary Partners
Presbytery of Utica
As a foundational funding partner, fiscal sponsor and learning laboratory: in its commitment to wrestle with practices that will lead Christians in its own Presbytery into new ways of “being Church” and to support and encourage the broader Christian Church in the U.S. to adopt similar, justice-inclined practices that are built on an active, healing practice of reparation and repair.
Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary
As a primary educational partner: as it works to develop a constructive theology grounded in the experience of the Black Church and Black/Womanist Liberation Theology that guides the whole church to recognize, address and repair structural systems of oppression.