Leadership

Living Legacy Project Board of Directors

Kristin Famula, Board Member

Kristin Famula serves as the President of the National Peace Academy (nationalpeaceacademy.us), an educational institute dedicated to holistic peacebuilding and peace education. The National Peace Academy focuses on developing and offering learning opportunities for bringing forth the peacebuilder in all of us. Kristin also serves professionally as a social justice and religious educator through the Unitarian Universalist faith. As an educator and a life-long UU, she works to create and offer opportunities for people of all ages to deepen their commitment to transforming systems of oppression through reflection, learning, and building relationships.

The Rev. Dr. Gordon Gibson, Board Member and Co-Founder

Gordon Gibson has been involved in organizing and leading pilgrimages to civil rights sites since 2004. During the first weeks after Gordon was ordained, he was in Selma, Alabama, taking part in early phases of the 1965 voting rights campaign there. He also brings his experience of living in Mississippi 1969-1984 when he was the Unitarian Universalist minister in the state. For seven of those years he was also an investigator for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In retirement, Judy and Gordon Gibson live in Knoxville, Tennessee. Gordon is the author of Southern Witness: Unitarians and Universalists in the Civil Rights Era, an engaging account of the roles that UU individuals and congregations played in the civil rights movement in the South in the 1950s and '60s. Gordon currently serves as a member of the Board and as the LLP historian.

John Harris, Board Member and Treasurer

John Harris’s interest has always been in the area of Racial/Social Justice and Anti-Oppression Work. John’s involvement in Unitarian Universalism began in in 1990 at the UU Congregation of the Palisades (UUCP), Englewood, NJ where he served as a Board Trustee and as a Racial and Social Justice Team Member. He also served on the Metro NY District Anti-Racism Team. In 2001 he and his wife Kathy moved to MD and joined the UU Congregation of Columbia (UUCC) where John served as a Trustee, and as a Black Lives Matter Team Member. Prior to this, he served as Social Action Committee Co-Chair. In the wider UU community, John served on The Journey Toward Wholeness Transformation Team, Joseph Priestley District; and on the Board of the Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice in the National Capital Region (UUSJ). In the local community John is a member of the Mental Health Players of Maryland (MPH), a group that uses role-play and interactive audience participation in addressing a comprehensive range of societal problems.

Reggie Harris, Board Member and Music Director

Reggie Harris has earned distinction as one of the foremost interpreters and song leaders of the music of the Underground Railroad and the Modern Civil Rights movement. With a passion for peace and justice, Reggie travels worldwide using his gifts to share hope and raise awareness of human rights in the spirit of Dr Martin Luther King’s beloved community. Visit reggieharrismusic.com for more about his music. Reggie currently serves as co-president of the Board and Director of Music.

Rev. James A. Hobart, Board Member

James Hobart is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister and a veteran of the Selma Voting Rights Campaign who has worked tirelessly for civil and voting rights throughout his life. Rev. Hobart is 2001 Minister Emeritus of First Unitarian Society of Denver where he served from 1983-2001. He currently serves as Immediate Past President of Antioch College’s Alumni Association, and is a former member of the College's Board of Trustees. His father, the Rev. Alfred W. Hobart served as minister of the UU Church of Birmingham from 1953 to 1964 and was an outspoken civil rights leader (learn more about the civil rights history of the UU Church of Birmingham). Rev. James Hobart has traveled with the Living Legacy Pilgrimage and was a prominent member of the planning teams for the LLP’s Civil Rights Veterans Gathering in Asheville, NC, in 2012, and the Marching in the Arc of Justice Conference in Birmingham, AL, in 2015.

Janiece J. Sneegas, Board Member

Jan Sneegas has worked in the meeting planning industry for over twenty years, first for the American Therapeutic Recreation Association, a non-profit professional association, and for the past seventeen years as the Director of General Assembly and Conference Services for the Unitarian Universalist Association, a liberal religious denomination (retired in 2019). She is most proud to have helped plan the Marching in the Arc of Justice Conference in March, 2015. This conference, initiated by the Living Legacy Project with support from the Unitarian Universalist Association, commemorated the 50 year anniversary of the Selma bridge crossing during the fight for Civil Rights. Jan holds a doctorate in Leisure Studies from the University of Illinois where she also served on the faculty.

Julian Sharp, Board Member

Julian Sharp is on the faculty at Sterling College in Vermont where he teaches courses at the intersection of spirituality, the natural world, and social justice in the concentration of environmental humanities. His courses include Community Organizing for Social and Political Change, Spirituality of Place, and Intro to Race. He is a recent graduate of the Pacific School of Religion, part of the consortium among the University of California at Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union. He has served as a board member of local and national organizations including the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Craftsbury Prudential Water Board, and the Craftsbury Community Care Center. Julian brings expertise as an activist/organizer, spiritual leader, and institutional leader. He has worked on local, state, and national political campaigns, including as an organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, and for MassEquality in Massachusetts where he organized for marriage equality.

Carlton E. Smith, Board Member

Carlton E. Smith is an ordained minister in the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) and a member of the UUA’s Congregational Life Staff for its Southern Region. He was one of the original five members of the Organizing Collective for Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism (BLUU), an activist renewal movement within that faith tradition. A native and resident Mississippian, he’s twice been a candidate for elected office — US Congress in 2018 and State Senate in 2019. He is the son of Eddie Lee Smith, Jr. and Luberta Elliott Smith, the first Black Mayor and First Lady of Holly Springs, Mississippi (1989-2001). He takes seriously his inheritance from Mississippi Civil Rights pioneers such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Medgar and Myrlie Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer and Vernon Dahmer. He feels most fulfilled when engaged in endeavors that carry their life-saving work forward.

Pamela Zappardino, Board Member

Pamela Zappardino holds a doctoral degree in Psychology from the University of RI and is a graduate of Leadership RI and Leadership Maryland. She serves on the Boards of Common Ground on the Hill, Rape Crisis Intervention Services of Carroll County, the Carroll County NAACP, the Community Foundation of Carroll County and the Living Legacy Project as well as on the steering committees of the WMC Heritage Society at McDaniel College and Carroll Citizens for Racial Equality. She has been on the Carroll County Public Schools’ Council for Multicultural Education for 15 years.

Co-Founders and Former Board Members

Judy Gibson
The late Rev. Dr. Hope Johnson, first Board President
Dr. Janice Marie Johnson
Annette Marquis