2021 on Star: The year of transition

Last year, after the cancellation of conferences on Star Island, the committee organized a well-received and well attended Virtual IA, where we shared community but could not be physically on island. This year, we are able to be physically on Star but with fewer people to achieve reduced density and maintain physical distancing guidelines. Some of us will be able to share community on Island and some of us will not be able to do so, but there will be live streaming of some activities planned.

A smaller conference means fewer people paying conference fees to support activities during the week, so some of our usual programming will not be possible. This means Star may seem more like an individual retreat with fewer people, but we will maintain as much as possible. Yoga, arts, and choir will occur in modified forms. We will have morning speakers, timely topics and will be looking for individuals to volunteer and organize various ad hoc programs like the senior woman’s group. There will be a youth program but it will be limited to 50 children.

Overall, this will be the year of transition from virtual to modified and, hopefully next year, back to our usual robust programming. So, if you ever wondered how it would feel to have more free time to wander the island with fewer people, this is the year to find out. We do still have room to accommodate a few more Shoalers. Please keep in mind that if we exceed our registration limit of 170 before May 1, we will implement a lottery and you will be notified of your registration status as soon as possible after that date.

As Spring arrives and vaccination rates continue to increase, we strongly believe Star will open this year. Here is the link to the Star Island Corp website for FAQs related to COVID-19. Updates are being made daily.

Please reach out to us if you have any questions.

Your IA Committee

Iyabo Obasanjo, IA 2021 Committee Chair
Laura Jaffe Espinosa
Greg Dixon
Gretchen Donehower
Dan Hotchkiss, Chair Emeritus
Kristin Laverty, Registrar/Treasurer
Katie Bender, Youth Program Director

Mónica Ortiz Uribe

Speaker at the 2019 International Affairs Conference

Mónica Ortiz Uribe is a freelance radio and print reporter who specializes in covering the U.S.–Mexico border and the American Southwest. She was one of three El Paso–based reporters—all women—to cover a vicious drug war in Ciudad Juárez beginning in 2008. Her coverage included the disappearance and murder of young women in that city. Mónica has also reported on Mexico’s judicial reform, strikes by Mexican factory workers, and water-management issues in the arid Southwest. Her reports on the impact of the Trump administration’s immigration and border enforcement policies air regularly on National Public Radio and Public Radio International.

Mónica graduated with a master’s in journalism from Columbia University in 2018. She has an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Texas at El Paso. To hear some of her recent work, follow this search on Google.

Julie Dahlstrom

Speaker at the 2019 International Affairs Conference

Julie Dahlstrom is a clinical associate professor at Boston University School of Law, where she teaches in the areas of immigration, human trafficking, gender-based violence, and public interest law. She also founded and directs the Immigrants’ Rights & Human Trafficking Program, which offers law students at BU the opportunity to represent noncitizen and survivor clients. Julie also founded and chairs the U and T Visa Working Group of the Immigration Coalition at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. She has written recently on immigration policy for The Hill.

Previously Julie served as a senior staff attorney for Casa Myrna Vazquez, where she represented survivors of commercial sexual and labor exploitation and engaged in systemic advocacy to remove barriers for survivors seeking to exit exploitation. She has served as a member of the Massachusetts Human Trafficking Task force and co-chair of its Victim Services Subcommittee.

Julie will discuss the expanding, evolving concept of human trafficking in the United States. What is human trafficking? When is an expansive definition of trafficking justifiable? How does trafficking relate to existing concepts—like domestic violence, sexual assault, labor exploitation, and prostitution—with which it often overlaps? Since 2000, Congress and all fifty states have passed legislation with varying definitions of the crime of human trafficking, presenting new and important challenges to protection and enforcement in the anti-trafficking field.

Maddalena Marinari

Speaker at the 2019 International Affairs Conference

Maddalena Marinari, who teaches history at Gustavus Adolphus College, is the author of Unwanted: Italian And Jewish Mobilization Against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965, forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press. She is also an editor (with Maria Cristina Garcia and Madeline Hsu) of A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965, an anthology on the impact of immigration restriction on the United States in the twentieth century. An immigrant herself, Maddalena has long been interested in the impact of immigration laws on immigrants, immigration flows, and American identity.

Ana Levy-Lyons

Minister of the Week at the 2019 International Affairs Conference

The Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons serves as senior minister of First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn. She is the author of No Other Gods: The Politics of the Ten Commandments, which reintroduces the Ten Commandments as practices for spiritual liberation and political resistance. She is a contributing editor for Tikkun magazine and has just finished writing a guide to preaching about climate change and ecological consciousness for the Center for Earth Ethics and The Climate Reality Project.

Ana lives on the upper west side of Manhattan with her husband Jeff and eight-year-old twins, Miriam and Micah, who are all excited to be joining her on the island. She writes, “I’m thrilled to be coming to Star Island to spend a week with all of you. The natural beauty and elemental power of the island are a perfect setting for opening our hearts to the world around us. I hope we can all use our worship time together and our private meditation and prayer time to reground ourselves in our connections with the earth, sea, and sky.”

Daniel Kanstroom

Speaker at the 2019 International Affairs Conference

Daniel Kanstroom author of Deportation Nation, Outsiders in American History, is currently working on a new book, Deportation World, which will explore the rise of deportation as a global phenomenon. Together with his students and co-counsel, he has provided counsel for hundreds of clients, won dozens of immigration and asylum cases (and lost a few), and authored amicus briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court and many other courts.

Dan is professor of law and Thomas F. Carney Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law School, where he teaches immigration and refugee law, international human rights law, Constitutional law, and administrative law. He is co-director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice and of the Post-Deportation Human Rights Project, which seeks to conceptualize and develop a new field of law while representing US deportees abroad. He founded the Boston College Immigration and Asylum clinic in which students represent indigent migrants and asylum-seekers.

Dan’s articles, book reviews and op-eds have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Journal of International Law, the UCLA Law Review, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the French Gazette du Palais, and many other venues.

Pardis Mahdavi

Speaker at the 2019 International Affairs Conference

Pardis Mahdavi is the author of Crossing the Gulf, a pathbreaking study of the lives of migrants in the cities of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait City. Through stories of the intimate lives of women and their families, she shows how laws and policies can lead migrants into illegality, statelessness, deportation, detention, and abuse.
Pardis is currently Acting Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Before coming to Denver, she served as professor and chair of anthropology, dean of women, and director of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College. She is a graduate of Occidental College, with a master’s in international affairs and PhD in sociomedical sciences and anthropology from Columbia.

In addition to Crossing the Gulf, Pardis has authored three books and edited one more in addition to numerous journal and news articles and is completing a work of literary fiction based on fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork. Her current work looks at the linkages between culture, diplomacy, and the ethics of engagement.
Pardis has been a fellow at the Social Sciences Research Council, the American Council on Learned Societies, Google Ideas, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

2018 IA Youth Staff

Our Program Director this year is Katie Bender. Katie has attended IA since 1985 and was a Pel for many years. Now a kindergarten teacher, Katie is excited to bring her professional experience to the IA Youth Program and to support an amazing team of equally enthusiastic, creative, and adventurous youth leaders this summer! Katie’s daughters (Abby 10, Brooke 7, and Lilla 5) are counting down the days until IA.

Marc Bender will be providing support to the youth program as a program assistant. Marc is an Assistant Principal at Wellesley High School and his background is in school counseling. He has been on the youth staff in both Toddlers and Brookies in the past and looks forward to getting to know the kids in each of the groups this summer. Marc is an avid “yardener” and chief caretaker of his daughters’ cats Skippy, BooBoo, and Stella. Marc and Katie live with their girls in Medfield, MA.

Toddlers

Mara Dowdall is a longtime Shoaler and former Pel who is thrilled to be attending IA week now with her own family. Mara has spent the last decade as UU parish minister (most recently at the UU Society of Burlington, VT) and has worked with children and youth in a variety of ways over the years. Mara lives in Burlington with her husband Ben (also on the youth staff) and sons Dean (6) and Cassidy (2), who are already hooked on Star. She is excited to be spending mornings with the toddler cohort this summer!

Emma Weinert attended IA when she was a toddler, and is excited to be back at IA again this year with her sisters! Emma is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and teaches outdoors skills to college students, staff, and elementary school students. Emma loves being in the outdoors and being around children – some Shoalers may remember her walking around last year with her niece attached to her hip. She is very excited to be spending her mornings with the toddlers this summer!

Barners

Tryst Chagnon & her family — Tryst Chagnon & family

Tryst Chagnon is Director of Religious Education at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh. Tryst also works as a divorce and custody mediator. She is a longtime Shoaler, the previous IA Youth Director and a former Pel. In her spare time she enjoys live and recorded music, spending time with friends, traveling, and dancing. Tryst lives in Raleigh, NC, with her partner, their three children, and their dog, Puddy.

Ben Fowler began coming to Star Island as a Pelican in the mid 1990s and decided he liked it so much he stayed around for a decade, eventually working year-round on the facilities staff. Ben and his wife Mara Dowdall met during their Pelican summers, and they now live in Burlington, Vermont with their two sons—Dean (6) and Cassidy (2). Ben works as an engineer in the energy efficiency field and while not doing that, enjoys biking and other outdoor adventures, and all things science/tech geeky.

Larries

Yuri Yamamoto is the Music Director at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh and a staff accompanist at Meredith College Music Department. She has six children of her own. Yuri has a Ph.D. in genetics and also enjoys reading and writing. Yuri loves musical improvisation and looks forward to being on Star with the Larries again this summer!

Elizabeth McVey Erickson is a former longtime Pelican and has served on the Youth Staff at the Pel Reunion Conference. She also has experience running two church school programs. Liz began going to Star Island in 1961 (!) and is thrilled to be back for another action-packed week with the Larries at the IA Conference this year. Liz met her husband (who does not attend Star Island), when they were both students at Andover Newton Theological School. They have two grown children and live on the coast of Maine.

Brookies

Rev. Megan Lynes grew up UU with Katie Bender at the Follen Church in Lexington, MA. After serving as the Parish Minister at the First Parish in Bedford for the last nine years, Megan recently made the leap to become the Minister of Faith Formation at the First Church in Sterling, MA, with Senior Minister, Robin Bartlett. Megan has also worked as a chaplain at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and with teens at the Interfaith Youth Initiative in Boston, and on the ropes course at Interlocken International Summer Camp in NH. She’s a member of a playback theatre troupe called True Story Theatre. Some of Megan’s favorite activities are improv theatre, team building games, making all sorts of art, contra dancing, playing with her cats, and laughing with friends old and new. This is her third year with the Brookies, and she’s looking forward to partnering with Andy Linscott and being with awesome youth for a great week on Star!

Andy Linscott is husband to Robin Bartlett, step-dad to Cecilia and Eloisa, and dad to Isaac. Andy has spent many a summer as a camp counselor. He currently works as an Academic & Career Coach at Fitchburg State University. Andy is excited to work with Megan Lynes this year.

Marshlandians

Robin Bartlett is wife to Andy Linscott, mother to Cecilia, Eloisa and Isaac, and Senior Pastor of the First Church in Sterling, MA (where she shares the church’s ministry with fellow youth program staff member Megan Lynes!) Robin has been a counselor in the IA youth program on and off for twenty-one years. She has also been the children’s program director, Sandpiper editor, and Minister of the week. However, leader of the middle school Marshlandians is by far her favorite role on Island. She pledges allegiance to Marshlandia forever: Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Dave Nagel (who lives in Philadelphia, PA) first came to Star as a conferee at age 12 and met his wife Emily while working as a Pelican. They have two kids, Owen and Willa. This is his second time working on IA Youth Staff and is very excited to help all Marshlandians enjoy their week on Star!

Seniors

Rev. Leon Dunkley is a lifelong Unitarian Universalist. He is a graduate of the Starr King School for the Ministry and has served churches in St. Paul. MN and Silver Spring, MD. His first career was as a professor of music. He taught for seven years at Brooklyn College and at Duke University. He left the academy in 2005 to pursue the ministry. He is a baseball fan, a dog lover and an unapologetic beer snob (who doesn’t take himself too seriously). He is a tireless advocate for joy, health, honesty and integrity.

Amelia Forman-Stiles lives on a farm in a tiny cabin in downeast Maine with her two amazing kiddos. She has her B.A. in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic and currently works with Aroostook Mental Health Center as a Sexual Assault Community Educator and Advocate. As an educator she brings curriculum into classrooms pre-K through college age, addressing everything from bullying and harassment, boundaries, consent and healthy relationships to best response practices and community resources and supports for survivors. As an advocate she works to support survivors as they navigate legal and other systems and as they focus on healing and moving forward. She also enjoys making the occasional film and writing a rare poem or two. Amelia worked as a Pel for many years and this will be her third year as a conferee at I.A.

2017 IA Youth Staff

Our Program Director this year is Katie Bender. Katiehas attended IA since 1985 and was a Pel for many years. Now a kindergarten teacher, Katie is excited to bring her professional experience to the IA Youth Program and to support an amazing team of equally enthusiastic, creative, and adventurous youth leaders this summer! Katie’s daughters (Abby 9, Brooke 6, and Lilla 4) are counting down the days until IA.

Marc Bender will be providing support to the youth program as a program assistant. Marc is an Assistant Principal at Wellesley High School and his background is in school counseling. He has been on the youth staff in both Toddlers and Brookies in the past and looks forward to getting to know the kids in each of the groups this summer. Marc is an avid “yardener” and chief caretaker of his daughters’ cats Skippy and BooBoo. Marc and Katie live with their girls in Medfield, MA.

Todlers

Sophia Lyons is originally from Los Angeles, CA, but has lived in Amesbury, MA for the past six years. She is entering her second year of seminary at Boston University, pursuing UU ministry with her husband, Jason McLin. She has two daughters, Olive (10) and Poppy (8). Sophia loves roller skating, dancing while driving, goats, scarves, vegan baked goods, The Grateful Dead, eucalyptus trees, guinea pigs, board games, laying on the rocks at Star, and really, really spicy food. She can’t wait to be back at IA for her 4th summer and is especially excited to spend her mornings with your toddlers!

Dave Nagel and family — Dave Nagel & family

Dave Nagel (who lives in Philadelphia, PA) first came to Star as a conferee at age 12 and met his wife Emily while working as a Pelican. This is his second time attending IA and is very excited to see his son Owen (3) and all the toddlers get to know the island. He looks forward to getting to know many new little friends!