Officers
Bill Slezak, President, Essex County. Bill has lived in West Orange, NJ with his wife Rickey, for the past 43 years. They have three grown children and five grandchildren. Bill retired from the US Army Corps of Engineers in 2013 after a 37-year career with the Corps as a civilian.
Bill previously served as UU FaithAction NJ Treasurer from 2015 to 2021. For the past two years, Bill has provided bookkeeping support to the two successor Treasurers. He also serves as Treasurer of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Essex County in Orange, NJ and has been a trustee with the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Northern New Jersey for the past 8 years.Bill is an avid tennis and pickleball player and a bicyclist.
Email: president@uufaithaction.org
Chris Budin, Meeting Convener, Summit. Over the course of his working career, Chris has dedicated himself to education and leadership around workplace equality initiatives. In their current role as both a Sr. Technologist and DEI Champion through Employee Resource Group Leadership, Chris has facilitated in-house and community-based workshops including anti-bullying, suicide prevention, workplace safety, mental health stigma reduction, disability justice rights, and racial, religious and cultural competency awareness.
Chris is a 501c3 Board of Directors member at Garden State Equality, where he has built strong collaborative networks on both the local and national level. Chris is also an elected member of the NJ Sussex County Democratic Committee.
Chris was accepted to Meadville Lombard Theological School and plans to start taking classes towards future ministerial work in their life’s calling of Social Justice. Chris is passionately committed to the values and principles of Unitarian Universalism and is in leadership with the UU Congregation at Montclair’s LGBTQ+ Justice Group (OutFront) and Membership Team, while also a member of the Pastoral Care Team, Allies For Racial Equity, and Undoing Racism Team.
Kevin Pierre, Treasurer, Montclair. 
Kevin Pierre graduated Bloomfield College with a degree in psychology with a concentration in anthropology and multicultural studies. He serves on the NAACP (Political Action Committee, Executive Committee & Election Committee). He has volunteered for the Montclair Red Cross running blood drives and, more recently, Narcan training working with Rutgers University. Kevin is the state Tri-Chair for New Jersey’s Poor People’s Campaign. He sits on the National Leadership Council Board for UndocuBlack. Kevin also currently sits on the Montclair Civil Rights Commission as well as on the Montclair Planning Board Commission, as the mayor’s designee.
Email: treasurer@uufaithaction.org
Nancy Griffeth, Secretary, Summit. Nancy Griffeth is a retired professor of computer science. She taught and did research at the City University of New York, Princeton, Georgia Tech, and Northwestern. In between teaching gigs, she was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs and (earlier) at Bellcore.
She became dedicated to environmental causes as a Unitarian Universalist member of the Summit UU congregation. She is a member of the Green Earth Ministry there and a regular attendee and occasional assistant at the Green Vespers service.
After her retirement, she became the Chair of the Environmental Justice Task Force of NJ Unitarian Universalist Faith Action NJ. With that group, she has supported making the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard more aggressive; she prepared testimony for BPU hearings on Community Solar; and she supported several important bills, including the groundbreaking EJ Law (known before passage as the “cumulative impacts bill”) and the Energy Equity Office in the BPU. She is currently a member of the Environmental Justice Advisory Council of the NJ Department of Environmental Protection, where she is an active member of the Air and Water Working Groups.
Her husband, Bill, is also a retired computer scientist. They have two children: Stephen Griffeth, a professor of math at the University of Talca in Chile, and Valerie Griffeth, a M.D./Ph.D. working in Critical Care in Chicago. She has three grandchildren, all living in Chile.
Trustees
Susan Druckenbrōd, Cherry Hill. Susan has been a member of the UU Church in Cherry Hill since 2012. Currently she is the co-chair of the Committee on Racial and Economic Equity. She also serves on the Lifespan Faith Engagement committee and is part of the TechCrUU. She served on the Board of Trustees for a two year term.
Susan is a teacher and has taught English as a Second Language to learners of all ages who come from more than 35 countries around the world. Susan has organized with progressive groups in South Jersey; working on good government, fair elections and running progressive candidates. She has also worked to bring Community Choice Aggregation to the ballot in Cherry Hill where voters will have the opportunity to make clean energy the energy source for the town.
In her spare time, she enjoys gardening, bike riding and competitive backgammon matches with her teenager.
The Reverend Doctor Sarah Lenzi, Ridgewood. The Reverend Doctor Sarah Lenzi was ordained to the Unitarian Universalist Ministry in 2012. Before turning full time to ministry, Rev. Lenzi, who holds a BA from Williams College and an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, completed her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work, published as “The Stations of the Cross: The Placelessness of Medieval Christian Piety” focuses on ritual practice and the integration of imagination, memory, the physical, the visual and the aural in creating transcendent experience. Rev. Lenzi brings her academic study of ritual to her worship leadership.
Rev. Lenzi’s ministry focuses on the value of the worship experience as a means of community building and encouraging personal growth along the spiritual journey. She hopes that participation in the communities she serves will help individuals to realize their capacity for love and compassion, to strengthen their sense of justice and power, and to affirm their own and others beauty and worth.
Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael, Montclair. Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael serves as the Senior Co-Minister at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Montclair. Her Master of Divinity is from Meadville Lombard Theological School where she studied part time at the University of Chicago. Her focus in ministry includes building interfaith and intercultural relationships, cultivating deep joy to foster collective liberation and honestly confronting the evils of racism, anti-trans bigotry, sexism, and indifference.
She has received awards for her interfaith justice work including an exemplary leadership award from Loudoun Interfaith Bridges and a Community Builder award from the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. During the 2008 presidential election she was honored to provide invocations for both Michelle and Barack Obama at campaign events. She is an Executive Team member at the Montclair NAACP, a leader of the New Jersey Faith Allies fighting for the Reparations Task Force, a Strategy Team Member on New Jersey Together – Essex, and a founding member of the Friends of the Howe House.
In her commitment to her own faith association she offers her service as a Good Officer providing conflict mediation, she has been invited to teach and lead on the themes of social justice and reparations, has authored an adult education curricula on Evil and she has mentored and supervised many new ministers and interns. In 2018 and 2019 she co-chaired the Board of Meadville Lombard Theological School and convened the search team for their current school President.
Rev. Anya is a gardener and athlete. She meditates, prays and practices yoga. She finds God in the stranger and holiness in the spaces where people meet.
Rev. Andree Cornelia Mol, Westwood. Rev. Andrée Cornelia Mol (pronouns: she/they) serves as the minister at Central Unitarian Church in Westwood, NJ. LGBTQ+ advocacy and support remain a central part of her ministry, helping to connect youth and adults in her area to both community and resources. Among her leadership and volunteer roles, Andrée remains an active member of TRUUsT (an organization of UU trans religious professionals), which views the work for liberation as intimately tied to all efforts to dismantle oppression.
Through Andrée’s varied experiences in filmmaking, leadership development, and ministry, she is committed to collectively exploring the role of transformative stories and dialogue in our spiritual lives. She lives with her wife near a lot of trees, birds and hiking trails, and is the proud parent of two children and two cats.