OurInitiatives
TheMicah Project
Founded in 1999, the Micah Project is a ten-month residential fellowship of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, and a partner project of the Episcopal Service Corps. Micah fellows make three primary commitments during their fellowship year. They serve 32 hours per week in mission-driven non-profit organizations or Episcopal Churches; they participate in spiritual formation and leadership training for 8 hours per week; and they live in intentional Christian community with other fellows. This fellowship is a year for emerging young leaders to explore questions of social change, spirituality, and vocation. This remains the primary initiative of Life Together. Follow the links under “program components” for more information regarding the structure of the Micah Project or how to apply. To meet some of the current fellows, visit here.
EsperanzaAcademy Teaching Fellowship
In the fall of 2012, Life Together launched a new teaching fellowship in partnership with Esperanza Academy–a tuition-free, independent day school for low income girls grades 5-8 in Lawrence, MA. Starting in August 2012, Life Together will hire four AmeriCorps teaching fellows that will serve at Esperanza as full-time intern teachers for two years.
The Esperanza fellows will teach classes, work and or coach in the extended day program and perform other responsibilities related to teaching. Esperanza fellows will also live in intentional community with one another in Lawrence, and will come down to Boston once a month to join the Micah fellows for leadership trainings and spiritual reflection.
Life Together SouthCoast
In the fall of 2012, Life Together expanded beyond the Boston area and hired 28 fellows to serve throughout eastern Massachusetts!
Life Together South Coast is currently recruiting for its second year in southern Massachusetts. LT South Coast is located in the gateway communities of Fall River and New Bedford about an hour south of Boston and twenty minutes from Providence, Rhode Island. These economically depressed urban areas pose many challenges and attract immigrants from all over the world to work in the fishing industry. South Coast fellows will get an opportunity to work as pioneer leaders in “urban neighborhood corridors.”
These corridors will be focused on building grassroots leadership and organizing local resources to empower communities and work toward long-term change on a neighborhood level. Each corridor will begin to build a coalition of local-area non-profit organizations and faith communities. South Coast fellows will spend their year of service working for one of these organizations. The social impact focus areas are immigrant advocacy, youth leadership development, and economic justice. This is an incredibly exciting opportunity to engage in grassroots social change!
A hunger for spiritual growth, a passion for social justice, and prior leadership experience are required. Spanish language skills are helpful but not required. Finally, Life Together South Coast is connected to the Life Together Community in Boston. All fellows will participate in Orientation together at the beginning of the year and then gather one Friday per month for a day of spiritual reflection, community building, and skill-based leadership training.
TheRelational Evangelism Pilot Project
The Relational Evangelism Pilot Project launched in the August of 2008, with the support of a three-year grant from Trinity Wall Street Grants, under the leadership of Rev. Arrington Chambliss. The founding mission was to engage a greater number of young adults in being the church, and to engage the church in God’s dream of justice, as an agent of social change in the world. In the past three years, Relational Evangelists have worked in parishes or chaplaincies to facilitate a more relational culture, to build small leadership teams, and to organize social action campaigns. In the fall of 2011, Life Together will convene a team to evaluate the three year pilot and discern what is next for Relational Evangelism. The work of Relational Evangelism, however, continues to influence all of Life Together’s other initiatives–including the training and formation curriculum for Micah Project fellows, the work of the Speaker’s Bureau, and the development of the emerging institute. To learn more about the work of this year’s Relational Evangelists, click here.
Hopein Action
Hope in Action (HIA) is Life Together’s Boston-wide initiative to engage young people of faith in social justice campaigns across the city. Using community organizing tools developed by Marshall Ganz, a professor at Harvard and veteran of the civil rights and United Farm Workers movements, Hope in Action aims to empower young adults to be leaders in the social transformation to which their faith calls them.
Hope in Action is led by the eight Relational Evangelists (REs) and the young adult teams they recruit to lead with them, all of whom receive training and regular coaching in community organizing. Each RE is situated at a partnering church or college chaplaincy, which serves as the base community for the RE’s organizing work. Learning the skills of public narrative and hosting one-to-one and house meetings, the REs identify an urgent challenge in their community and recruit a leadership team. The team envisions and strategizes a campaign that builds individual leadership, community power, and achieves a measurable outcome.
Campaigns have focused on a variety of issues including transgender equality, foreclosure-prevention, and community garden development.
AnEmerging training institute
From May 6-8, 2011, Life Together offered a three-day training for Program Directors and Corps Members from The Episcopal Service Corps in the Leadership Arts of Public Narrative and Team Building for Change. This training was the first annual gathering of The Episcopal Service Corps and a pilot training for Life Together’s emerging missional institute. For more information, visit our current offerings page.
Speaker’sBureau
With the hope of raising a new generation of missional leaders for the Church and the world, Life Together is working to widen the “threshold of church,” through community building, evangelism, and spiritual activism, using the practices of community organizing. At Life Together, we are eager to meet you and share the stories of our work with your community and others, empowering them to broaden their outreach and deepen their sense of mission as agents of God’s work in the world. Specifically, we have heard from many Episcopal churches in the Diocese of Massachusetts that they would be interested to learn more about our work and to meet some of the young people serving in our programs. To broaden our own outreach, we launched the Speaker’s Bureau in February 2011, through which we have begun to send fellows out in pairs to speak and facilitate conversations at churches throughout the Diocese.
Our hope for the Speaker’s Bureau is that it will allow us to build relationships with many churches and communities in the Diocese to which we are not already connected. Through the Bureau, parishes will be able to meet our interns and learn in greater detail about what we’re doing, as well as begin to imagine afresh their own call and mission as a community.
Fellows will share stories of call about their own faith journeys and their experience in Life Together. They will use their own stories to open and facilitate a conversation around vocation and mission with gathered members of the congregation, centered on the question “Why do you do what you do?”
As we move ahead with the Speakers Bureau, we will develop new content in response to the interests we hear expressed by congregations. Our hope is that we will eventually have the capacity to lead skill-based trainings in servant leadership, faith-based community organizing, and Public Narrative for interested congregations.
To request a visit, email Jason Long.
