Message from our Minister
JUUF is a lay-lead congregation with a contracted worship minister once a month for the 2024/2025 worship year.
Rev. Teri Schwartz (she/her) is a Unitarian Universalist minister and the founder of Spirit+Strategy, a ministerial coaching, counseling, and consulting practice. Formerly, she served as Senior Co- Minister of the First Unitarian Church of Chicago from 2013-2021, along with her husband and colleague, the Rev. David Schwartz. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School and Brown University, she has served as a chaplain in hospitals, palliative care, hospice, and to UU seminarians. She lives in the Denver metro area, with David, their two kids, ages 14 and 12, a 170-pound St. Bernard dog, two Chicago alley cats, and a mischievous, aggressively affectionate tuxedo kitten. She’s a yoga enthusiast, avid meditator, cheers for the Golden State Warriors basketball team, loves chocolate, and talks to her house plants only occasionally.
We also have the pleasure of being led once a month by the Sukkat Shalom Student Rabbi!
Jennifer Moses is a graduate of Brown University (where she met her husband Ron Beller, and on whose Board she has served for eight years) and has an MBA from Harvard Business School. She has three wonderful children: Sarah, who is a lawyer in Anchorage and lives with her husband Skye; Jesse, who is a fin tech startup entrepreneur and lives in LA with his wife Vita, and Leah, who is finishing her sophomore year at Kenyon College.
Jennifer was a Managing Director in Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs in New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and London. After she left finance she built a children’s charity in London called ARK that started and runs 36 schools for over 30,000 low income children and also developed Antiretroviral Drug treatment programs in South Africa and Mozambique. She helped restructure the Courtauld and the British Museum and then ran a policy think tank for the Liberal Democrats in London. Jennifer was a Special Adviser to Prime Minister Gordon Brown during the financial crisis of 2008-9, helping to restructure the British banking system and consumer finance regulation. Jennifer moved to San Francisco in 2009, where she and her husband started Caliber Public Schools, a public charter school organization serving 1800 low income students of color in the East Bay in publicly funded, non selective K-8 schools that have greater numbers of Special Needs students than the Districts in which they operate. She was CEO of those schools until 2019. She also sits on the Board of Rothschild & Co, the French-Anglo bank.
Jennifer lives in Aspen. She moved from San Francisco where she had been an early Board Member of the KitchenSF, a start up synagogue that has brought community, Torah, great music, food and study to the Bay Area. She is a Board member of the Reform Aspen Jewish Congregation. Jennifer has had a wonderful year in Jerusalem and can’t wait to get to know the community in Juneau.