Rev Connie Yost – Community Minister
The Rev. Connie Yost is an affiliated community minister with First Unitarian Church, Portland, grounding her ministry with the Economic Justice Action Group. She has served in community ministry for the last 16 years focused on social justice for the underserved and often forgotten — poor, disabled, very young and elderly.
Connie currently serves as founder of Friends Stay Warm, a nonprofit ministry dedicated to supporting low-wage workers through utility assistance and advocacy. She works in partnership with the Western Farmworkers Association and Friends of Seasonal and Service Workers in the Portland metro area. She is the co-President of the Board of Farmworker Ministry Northwest. She is on the planning committee of the Interfaith Alliance on Poverty, a coalition that advocates for and assists those living in poverty. She also teaches at the Franciscan Spirituality Center in Milwaukie, Oregon.
Connie is the founder and former executive director of EarthWorks Community Farm, a nonprofit ministry providing job training for at-risk youth and organic produce for the low-income community in East Los Angeles. She is the founding executive director of the Chalice Oak Foundation, a UU nonprofit which provides fiscal sponsorship and management training for fledgling values-based projects. She served as a hospice and hospital chaplain and administrator of the national UU Society for Community Ministries.
Connie also serves as a spiritual director, teacher, preacher, activist, and minister of rites of passage. She is currently a certified ombudsman for the state of Oregon Long-term Care. Formerly, she served as a court-appointed advocate for abused and neglected children (CASA).
As a minister, spiritual director, entrepreneur and advocate for the poor, Connie has been deeply influenced by the words and works of Dorothy Day who asks: “The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?”