Cade Murray

Chair of Governing Board – One year term

I began attending First Parish in 2010, shortly after moving to Cambridge from the San Francisco Bay area.  I joined the Finance Committee in 2012, served as Chair for 5 years, and then was elected to the Governing Board as Treasurer from 2018-2022, and Vice-chair for this past year.  During this time, I have also been active in other areas of the congregation, including religious education, governance transition, the Youth Homeless Shelter, personnel, and most recently the building. In all of this work, my primary motivation has been to help First Parish better serve all members of our congregation, as well as to reach out and become more involved in the larger community. I particularly like working on structural and organizational issues that allow us to be more effective advocates for our vision and values, and I look forward to continuing this work as Board chair. 

Tod Hibbard

Vice-Chair of Governing Board – One year term.

I was raised Catholic, and that early experience of being asked by authority figures to believe things that couldn’t possibly be true put me off organized religion altogether.  Years later, when my wife Cynthia and I had children of our own approaching school age, we decided they needed a religious education – if only for their cultural literacy.  But it had to be one that was open-minded and inclusive.  Neither of us had been raised Unitarian Universalist, but it seemed like it might be a non-toxic environment for the kids; so we visited our local UU church, and found a nurturing, sustaining community both for our children and for us.  We ended up teaching in the cooperative RE program, which our kids attended before going on to flourish in the active youth group there.  I organized the annual church auction and the annual oriental rug sale and served as chair of the finance committee, chair of the annual all member canvass, chair of the standing committee, as a member of the bequest society and as auditor.  Cynthia chaired the welcoming committee and was a member of the ministerial intern committee.   We were members of that congregation for twenty years until, as empty-nesters, we moved back to Cambridge (where we had met in college 40 years earlier).    

Professionally, I am retired after a long career in banking and finance, most recently as head of treasury operations at Tufts University.  Since joining First Parish in 2018, I have served as one of First Parish’s liaisons to the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (“GBIO”), as chair of the Finance and Development Committee, as a member of the Building Advisory Committee and as an at-large member of the Board.  I am honored to have been nominated to serve as vice chair of the Board and, if elected, I hope to bring my experience, perspective, and energy to our shared work of nurturing, supporting and sustaining our First Parish community and its work in the larger community. 

Rich Lawson

Clerk – Two year term.

My wife and I started attending a UU Church in Wilmington, Delaware in the early 1990s. We wanted our kids to have a liberal religious education and we wanted to be part of a  religious community ourselves.

When my family and I first moved to Massachusetts in 2000, we lived in the suburbs and attended First Parish in Framingham for nearly 20 years. During that time I taught quite a few RE courses, was a member of the RE Council, and eventually chaired that. I was also elected to the Board and eventually chaired that, too.

My wife and I are now empty nesters. We were fortunate to find a house in Somerville in 2020, so we started to look for a new church community. The pandemic complicated that, but the virtual services and virtual discussion groups at First Parish in Cambridge made it clear that this was a good spiritual home.

Since I joined First Parish, I’ve been active in Soul Matters groups, first as a participant, then as a facilitator. I helped organize the Defund Fear program, which was  the UUA Common Read before Mistakes and Miracles. I am currently a member of the Racial Equity Team, where I have been developing a relationship with Cambridge HEART.

It is an honor to be nominated to join the Board as the Clerk. I look forward to doing what I can to support the congregation in this role.

Nina Lytton

Member-at-large – One year term to fill remaining year of term vacated by Tod Hibbard.

I am honored to have been invited to join the Board of First Parish.  I began attending First Parish in September 2018, while I was a student at Meadville Lombard Theological Seminary.  I formally joined the congregation in 2019 because I saw the people of First Parish doing the work of my kind of faith.  At First Parish, I have participated in the Beloved Conversations program and served on the Racial Equity Team, the Strategic Planning Committee, and the Governance Advisory Committee. As we look forward to the 400th anniversary of our church in 2036, I am particularly interested in the early history of First Parish, especially the indigenous history. 

Ministry is “act two” for me, a call that came after a career in high tech and a midlife detour in microbrewing in Hawaii.  While I was on the Big Island, I became a student of, then served as an apprentice to a Hawaiian spiritual teacher, the late Mahealani Kaiwikuamookekuaokalani.  My moral philosophy and spiritual tradition come from my Kumu’s Hawaiian tradition, and I am an ally of the unceded Hawaiian kingdom.  My ethnicity is European settler and Native American.  

I was recognized as Humanist Chaplain and Celebrant after I graduated from seminary in 2019. I served as an interfaith chaplain at Brigham and Women’s Hospital for a two-year period that spanned the first wave of COVID-19.  Since 2021, I have been serving as an interfaith chaplain at MIT, where I work a lot of nights and weekends.  I support the Addir Interfaith Dialogue Fellowship and, as acting director of the Radius Program in Technology and Ethics, I support the student activists.  I serve the indigenous students at MIT, and am a mentor to MIT’s First Nations Rocket Team.  I also serve the MIT community as a celebrant of interfaith weddings and memorials.  

Patrick Sullivan

Member-at-large – 2 year term

Twenty years ago, when I moved to Cambridge, I was a recovering Catholic who was not in search of a church to join. One day while passing First Parish my wife said to me, “Why don’t you go in and see what it’s about, you look at it every time we pass.” It turns out she knew more about what I needed than I did. I still remember that first sermon by Thomas Michaelson on volunteerism and I was hooked from the start. By 2006 I became a member and never left. I discovered that I was not in search of a new or different dogma but a community in which I found fellowship, purpose and explore what I truly believed. First Parish provided me with those things and more.

In my time at First Parish, I have been involved in numerous committees and teams. The most important to me was the Worship Team, GBIO Core Team and by extension the Re-entry Steering Team and facilitating the NO Tough Guys group since 2019. 

What I believe I can bring to the Governing Board is deep experience in how organizations function, having been an organizational consultant and coach for over 30 years, a commitment to social justice with my volunteer work through the Jericho Project with men in prison as well as my long history with the church.