From Director: Lindsay Caddle LaPointe

Finding a “community with intention” was not on my radar as a 13-year-old growing up in Duxbury, Massachusetts. I had just finished taking the course AYS (About Your Sexuality now named OWL - Our Wholes Lives) where I experienced bonding with other youth from different churches in the area.  Then with very little knowledge of what came next;  I came of age to join the Young Religious Unitarian Universalists (YRUU) program.

Now, I am a dancer, mother, spouse, educator, filmmaker, and creative with her own business—and I would not be empowered to be who I am today if it weren’t for the YRUU program. 

I can say the same for my good friend, Dawn Mackechnie. 

Now also a mother, wife, and graphic designer, Dawn is also the director of children and youth ministry for the Unitarian Universalists church in Barnstable, MA. A job I saw coming for her when we were just 16.  Even then, she was a leader to her peers, listening and guiding them to better places.

In 2021, we mused, once again and over a pandemic quarantine zoom call we started asking the questions: 

• What was that experience we had in YRUU?  

• How did we know, at the age of 17, how to lead an entire memorial service for a member of our youth group who died?

• What are the former YRUU participants doing with their lives now? 

…

Dawn and I knew that making a documentary about this extraordinary YRUU program was something worth telling. 

So, with the help of Naomi Kooker who provides us an outside perspective having grown up a Preacher's Kid in the Methodist Church - She, Dawn, and I began this journey.

Our documentary's title: Why Are You You? (Now spelled out) has the purpose to document and hold space in our UU history and to show how YRUU transformed and saved lives, but how teen empowerment is nothing to mess with: When we find a sense of belonging at the most tender times in our lives as youth, we thrive as adults.