Rev. Lauren Spivey Levwood has been a board member of UU Ministry for Earth since February 2022, and has served as board chair since July 2024. A Southerner and a Virginia native, Rev. Lauren serves as a minister for two UU congregations in the beautiful western Virginia mountains: the UU Church of the Shenandoah Valley and the UU’s of the Blue Ridge. Her call to earth advocacy began in this region in the early 2000’s while working as a teacher and administrator for The Living Education Center for Ecology and the Arts, through which she was invited by activist Larry Gibson to witness the devastation of Mountaintop Removal firsthand. Rev. Lauren’s professional background also includes working as a massage therapist, birth and postpartum doula, Birthing From Within childbirth mentor, modern dancer, and movement educator. Her decades-long experience in the field of somatics informs her specialty in embodied spiritual practices. A religious naturalist, she is spiritually nourished by experiences of awe and wonder arising in our natural world.

Betsy Tomic is a finance and business professional and attends the UU Congregation of the Hudson Valley in New York State. She has been a UU for over 15 years. Besides serving as Treasurer of UUMFE for the past 5 years, she has served on her congregational Board, Green Sanctuary, Membership, Arts, and Buildings & Grounds committees.  

Since retiring from a career in higher-education policy and management positions, Anne-Marie has oriented her life around earth-centered activities. In addition to community volunteer positions, she leads the Earth Care Team at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Richmond (VA). She has also served as Treasurer, Co-Leader of the Capital Campaign, and Chair of the Endowment Committee. She enjoys reading, hiking, playing the ukulele with her husband, and visiting their sons’ families in California.

Over her life of service to humanity, Swamini Adityananda Saraswati has worked with national and international nonprofit and interfaith organizations from the ground level to the United Nations and World Bank levels, working on climate change, hunger, water scarcity, violence, global poverty, interfaith harmony, and other crucial issues. Swamini was the founding Director of an interfaith environmental and humanitarian alliance in India; the Interim Executive Director of the world’s largest interfaith organization, United Religions Initiative; the Associate Executive Director of the Elijah Interfaith Institute, working closely with the Pope and Dalai Lama; and co-founder of Chicago’s Pan-African Association; and has spearheaded rights-based campaigns and communications with ActionAid. She completed her Clinical Pastoral Education at Northwestern University’s Central DuPage Hospital, and served as an Intern Minister with First UU Church of San Diego. Recently, she was certified as a Mindfulness Meditation teacher through the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Greater Good and the Awareness Training Institute. A Hindu-UU, in 2012, in the high Himalayas, she became one of the world’s few western females to be ordained in a traditional Hindu order of Adi Shankaracharya. She is now proud to also be a Candidate for UU Ministry, and is delighted to be serving as the Vice Chair of UU Ministry for Earth.

Rashid Shaikh, Ph.D., is a seasoned research executive with over four decades of experience in the leadership and administration of diverse scientific organizations and programs. His scholarly interests encompass the scientific underpinnings of the health effects associated with environmental degradation and climate change, as well as the institutional frameworks that support the generation and utilization of impartial, policy-relevant knowledge. He is active at the First Parish in Cambridge Unitarian Universalist, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Rev. Valerie Freseman is the contract minister at the Unitarian Universalists of Southold, a UU Congregation in the heart of Long Island’s wine and farm country. She graduated from Union Theological Seminary in 2014, where she was active in the Ecology Caucus. She has served congregations in NJ, New York, and Ohio. Prior to her formation as a UU minister, she worked in the non-profit sector in New York City.