Spencer Lavan, most recent past dean of Meadville-Lombard Theological School, was one of the youth involved soon after the merger. He describes the structure of LRY thus:

LAVAN: Well in 1954 the Universalist Youth Fellowship (UYF)merged with American Unitarian Youth (AUY) . . . the structure of LRY as it was founded was that there were four officers, and then a council. The council was made up of four officers either two or four councilors at large, and representatives--one youth representative from each district. You know that the districts were not the same as they are now, but they were approximately the same.
That council carried on the work of the organization, in between the annual meetings, which were held in the summer they were week-long conferences, usually held on college campuses.
ME: So the annual meeting was the same as the social and workshop part of the conference?
LAVAN:Yes, that’s right. There would be business meetings also during that conference. And, for instance, I remember in 1955 the meeting was at Olivett College in Michigan, and uh, so we just gathered there and uh, there were theme speakers, workshops, social activities, and business meetings.
ME: So it was kind of like GA?
LAVAN: Kind of like a GA model, yes. In addition to the structure of the four officers and the council, there was an executive director, there was AUA and UYF appointed staff people, and Leon Hopper was the executive director from 1957 to 1963, and then there were other directors after that.
ME: So the executive director was a youth, or an adult?
LAVAN: It was an adult, usually a younger adult.
ME: So it was someone who maybe had recently aged out of LRY?
LAVAN: Well, Leon Hopper had been the president of AUY, then gone to Harvard Divinity School, and then was serving in a small congregation in Massachusetts...being executive director.
ME: Okay, so executive director was a grown-up position. Was that the only adult position in LRY at that time?
LAVAN: No, there were several different people. When LRY was established in 1954, there was a woman named Eileen Layton who was an associate director for the college-aged group--it was college and high school organization at that time, and then it was Alice Harrison who worked on the department of Religious Education--she was more a Junior High level person, and Sam Wright was executive director the first couple of years the group was in existence, and then Bill Gold was in there for one year, and then finally Leon Hopper came in 1957 and stayed for six years, which provided some [stability].

When LRY began, it was composed of both high school and college-aged people, and their goals and mission were somewhat different than those of UU youth today. Lavan says,

Oh, the mission, yes. I think the mission was to provide religious education for high school and college students in a particularly --how should I say? Idealized setting...and I certainly learned a lot. I recently gave an odyssey at the Central Midwest District ministers' meeting and mentioned that for instance, one of the things that was most important when I was in high school was hearing [?] Harrington give a talk on the dangers of nuclear war. Now that may sound like old hat, now, but it was very unusual for somebody who was coming from the kind of family and church background that I did to hear anything like that. And so I think it was a place where we could deal with social justice issues, become idealistic about the world, and understand something about liberal religion in the face of growing--what was called neo-orthodox orientation of Protestantism during that time.
(Statements by Spencer Lavan exce