Alumni Spotlights

Alumni Spotlight: Marq Loza

Name and pronouns: Marq Loza (he/him/his)

Cohort year: 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 

Where are you living now: Des Moines, Iowa  

What I’m doing now: Career Planner and Adult Educator 

How has Life Together impacted your life?

Life Together opened some amazing opportunities for me. My fellowship years were on the South Coast of Massachusetts. The work through my site placement focused on worker’s rights, but this experience made me aware of my love of learning. I learned about the living history of manufacturing and immigration in America, as well as the struggles faced by communities that see their jobs disappear. Our program on the South Coast encouraged us to engage with the community outside our placement, so on my free time I became involved with Portuguese United for Education, a non-profit language school that celebrates the history of Portuguese-speaking peoples and the multicultural roots of the South Coast. With them, I learned to speak the Portuguese language and they reviewed my application for a Master’s Program at the University of Coimbra, in Portugal.

At the end of my two-year experience with Life Together I packed up and moved to the other side of the Atlantic, where I was successful in completing the Master’s program entirely in Portuguese. Of course, this was in large part thanks to my experience in Life Together and the South Coast community that prepared me for the adventure. Although I had the opportunity to stay in Portugal, I decided that after my master’s it was time to return to the United States. I wanted to start a career and hoped to find something true to what I learned about myself during my years in Life Together: I wanted service and learning at the core of my career. 

I moved to Des Moines, Iowa in the fall of 2019 and took a job teaching a High School Equivalency curriculum to adult learners. The community college I work for was starting a new group for Spanish-speaking adults pursuing their High School Diploma, and they asked if I would help develop and teach the curriculum. I was fascinated to find a job that had would demand so much service and learning, so this became my focus for two years. Once the program was in place and it required less hours I continued teaching but started another job through the State of Iowa, as a career planner. In this role I assist people from all social and cultural backgrounds transition to new careers. On a daily basis I meet people who are curious or excited to start something new, but I also meet those who are experiencing very difficult moments, trying to figure out what comes next for themselves and for their families. 

It is an honor to serve. I am thankful for the many experiences that exposed me and equipped me to meet people of diverse backgrounds and recognize all as my neighbors. Although my time in Life Together seems distant at times, I don’t forget that building community happens intentionally, and I plan on continuing to learn, to serve and to walk with others, whether the connection feels evident or perhaps non-existent.

Alumni Spotlight: Meredith Clark

Name and pronouns: Meredith Clark, she/they

Cohort year: 2017-2019 (two years)

Where are you living now? New Haven, CT

What are you doing now? I’m a leather worker under the name Beacon Craft Studio. I am also co-founder of the New Haven Crafters of Color collective.

Website: https://beaconcraftstudio.square.site/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/BeaconCraftStudio/

How has Life Together impacted your life?

I stayed full-time at my host site, I Have A Future, for two years after Life Together. My time as a Life Together fellow and later Lead Organizer continues to shape my orientation to the world. The clearest example is the New Haven Crafters of Color collective—the fruition of the community oriented justice work that I learned in my time in Life Together. It’s not always easy, but we have put on about 10 free pop-ups for artists of color in New Haven who struggle to break into the art scene. Our group is entirely POC of all races, and the majority make under 50% of the average median income for our area. We believe that work and dedication are no less valuable than financial deposits, and seek to lift each other up together. One event I’m particularly proud of is our recent fundraiser for Palestine, in which we raised almost $3,500 for Medical Aid for Palestine and Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund through artist donations that were raffled and auctioned off. I am under no illusion that Gazans can access aid during the onslaught of bombing, but it is a way to help along with contacting legislators and shutting down business as usually. It was also a beautiful way to experience solidarity with other people who believe in Palestinian life. All of us as artists have all faced repercussions like shadowbanning for our pro-Palestinian, anti-war advocacy, but we believe that our relative privilege as Americans means we have a responsibility to the artists of color in Palestine as well.

In a less obvious but spiritually meaningful way, I also turn to chant-songs as my preferred form of prayer. I also lived with Mer Wade, my LT housemate, from 2019-2023 and count my cohort-mates Mer and Hannah as two of my closest friends to this day.

Alumni Spotlight: Lydia Strand

Name and pronouns: Lydia Strand (she/they)

Cohort years: 2013-2015

Where are you living now? I’ve been in Boston since Life Together and live in Jamaica Plain with my partner, Cicia Lee (2014).

What are you doing now?

I’m working part time with Life Together as the Prayer and Wellness Partner – supporting the fellows and their community as they navigate their lives through the program year! I’ve enjoyed re-steeping in some of the core material and commitments of Life Together’s to a life of community, prayer, and action–and learning about how the program and fellows over the last several years have developed and evolved conversations about each of these pillars.

And, I’m also working with a project born out of the “Nuns & Nones” group that is building an interfaith and interspiritual community of people across the country committed to shared study, prayer, action, and celebration. It draws inspiration from relationships with communities of women religious–nuns in monasteries across the US. In some ways, there are similarities to the Life Together program in that it’s an attempt to build an alternative lifestyle in which spiritual practice, justice, and relationship is at the center.

How has Life Together impacted your life?

The greatest impact that Life Together has had on my life is through the relationships and friendships that have shaped the last decade of my life. I’ve been in community with people who have been so creative with seeking lives of spiritual community, of social change, and of self-knowing. From building various informal intentional communities, to pursuing contemplative retreats, and trying out learning the various crafts of community organizing and political action, the people I’ve met through Life Together have helped me keep open the call and dream of a life full of Spirit-led connectedness and transformation. I’ll soon age out of the identity of ‘young adult,’ but the experience that was seeded in Life Together of a life of prayer and action has been nourished and strengthened through these relationships. I’m not done with the experiment!

And, I hope it is a lifelong one. I was introduced to Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk and Christian meditation teacher, by Ethel Fraga, a mindfulness and contemplative practice teacher who taught with Life Together about a decade ago. He writes:

“It is a real challenge to find a new way to express our Christian life. It is so easy to get into rules and organization and so to narrow the freedom of the Spirit. The essential thing that Jesus left the church was the Spirit. It is by learning really to trust the Spirit, in our prayer and meditation, and to share this trust with one another that a new language will gradually form.” -- Bede Griffiths, from The New Creation in Christ: Christian Meditation and Community.

I hope to keep deepening in awareness of the always-evolving leading of the Spirit–in and through new and old experiments in living into the transformative and redemptive teachings of Jesus.

Alumni Spotlight: Lily Luo

Name and pronouns: Lily Luo (She/Her)

Cohort year: 2016-2018

Where are you living now? New York City 

What are you doing now? 

I just moved to New York last fall so I'm working on getting settled there with my wife. We just had our big church wedding in June and it was so lovely to gather all the friends and family. A highlight was that we had our mothers read a passage from bell hooks’ All About Love in four different languages- German, Portuguese, Chinese and English!

Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear-- against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect-- to find ourselves in the other. —bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

Jocelin, another Life Together alum, helped officiate the wedding and gave a beautiful sermon about how we find God in connections. I also just got back from visiting Detroit, because I'm working on my PhD dissertation about Grace Lee Boggs. It was amazing to see the visionary organizing happening there as people try to reimagine systems beyond capitalism. Urban farms that fight for food sovereignty. Schools that model place-based learning. Activists that take seriously both the material and spiritual needs of us all. Shout out to The James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, The Boggs School, Feedom Freedom, Birwood House, Freedom Dreams, and so many other orgs that capture the lineage and legacy of both the Boggses! 

How has Life Together impacted your life?

What I really appreciated about my time in Life Together was the intentionality with which we approached our organizing work, facilitation, and spirituality. And that intention was toward connection. Even through disagreements and struggles, I've found that the skills I gained have stayed with me. Skills like how to ask ourselves and each other, what does it mean to grow our souls and what does a world governed by love look like? It was such an honor to be surrounded by other travelers who were equally passionate about protesting white supremacy as they were about creating spaces of queer joy. 

Alum Profile: Will Harron

Name and pronouns: Will Harron (he/him/his)

Cohort year: 2014-15 Micah; 2015-16 Emmaus, 2020-21 Prayer Partner; trainer in 2019, 2021, and 2022.

Where are you living now? Greenfield, MA, in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts 

What are you doing now? Wearing too many hats - I'm the Province 1 Coordinator and the Network Organizer for the Young Adult Ministry Network in Western Massachusetts, plus I serve in all sorts of volunteer gigs on the topic of formation and young adult and campus ministry. My paid work is basically in planning and running Zoom meetings between people engaged in ministry who want to connect, collaborate, and support each other in that work, and excitingly, I can direct them towards various grants to support that work. I coordinate a provincial (New-England wide) Young Adult and Campus Ministry network, serve on churchwide councils for Young Adult/Campus ministry and Christian formation, and am doing volunteer campus ministry in Amherst MA. Plus, I've gotten involved in the Western Massachusetts Sacred Harp shape-note singing community, which has been a dream.

How has Life Together impacted your life?

In so many ways. LT was a place from which I could spend two years serving in a parish (Saint Mary's in Dorchester) building relationships, being formed by a community, learning how the church functions, and experimenting with how to do ministry as a lay leader and as a young adult in and alongside the church. LT was an incubator that trained me in community organizing and helped give me superpowers like "facilitate a 1 hour zoom call that people leave energized and want to come back to" or "put on a short worship service with no notice and no sweat" or "give a public narrative for something I love" or "run a training that doesn't turn into a grumble-thon." LT was a community where I made dear friends who continue to shape my life. LT is a source of hope and inspiration to me: that these old bones of the church still have life, that an Episcopal organization can thread the needle between being something that's part of a church and something that can serve and resource people who have no desire to be a part of the church, that young adults can be given power and resources and turned loose to experiment and collaborate and make the somethings-new that the world needs. And LT gave me concrete connections that have led me to the career and vocational place I am - from my first job out of LT in the DioMA offices to my M.Div program at the Boston University School of Theology, to my work now in Western Massachusetts and across the Episcopal Province of New England.

Alum Profile: Lib Gatti

Name and pronouns: Lib Gatti (they/them)

Cohort year: 2015-2016

Where are you living now? Mission Hill, Boston MA

What are you doing now? 
After working as a chaplain with my Life Together placement site (The MANNA Community, at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul) for five years, I transitioned into various public health roles. First, with Partners in Health during the initial phase of the COVID-19 crisis, and then Fenway Health, at their Drug User Health Program needle exchange site in Cambridge. I learned to adapt my leadership and chaplaincy skills to a healthcare setting, and was able to keep working with the communities that I love. I took a few months off this spring to rest and support a family member experiencing some deep grief, and just this week I have started a new job as the Manager of Wellness Programs for the New England Culinary Art School. I will be developing and implementing curriculum and programming centered on student wellness, as well as helping the school become more trauma-informed in its approaches to learning and student care. I am extremely excited to be bridging my love for people, community care, and amazing food into what feels like a dream job!

How has LT impacted your life? 
In so many ways! Life Together gave me concrete skills, as well as a network of relationships, that have made my success as a leader possible. Since completing the fellowship in 2016, I have lived in community with friends from Life Together and used many of the tools we were trained in at every job I have had. Working at MANNA completely changed the trajectory of my career, empowering me to go to divinity school and enter the Postulancy for Holy Orders with the Episcopal Church. Both my placement site at MANNA and the monthly trainings with Life Together laid an organized, spiritually grounded, and relationally resourced foundation for my career, and set me on a path to do powerful work rooted in community and oriented around justice. To this day, I reach for the LT network when I am trying to solve complicated problems at work, when I am facing a spiritually challenging situation, or when someone in my community is in need. In so many ways, I am who I am (and where I am!) today thanks to Life Together.

Alumni Profile: Amber Sarpy

Name and pronouns: Amber Sarpy (she/her)

Cohort year: 2009-2010

Where are you living now? Austin, TX area

What are you doing now? Music Therapy/Mental Health Counseling; Executive Director of The Clear and Blameless Word Ministries; Children's Ministry in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas

How has LT impacted your life?

Life Together was a pivotal moment in my life. I was in a great transition period. Prior to becoming a Life Together intern, I applied to attend graduate school. I was also advised to apply to be a DioMass Intern. I became part time grad student and a DioMass Intern at the same time. I found myself living with many identities that year: a woman, an Afro-Latina, a musician, a music educator, the daughter of a Nondenominational Pastor, a graduate student, an intentional community member, a community organizer in training, and a young adult minister. I was given the opportunity to explore how the many facets of my identity, at that moment, would inform the work for that year. It was very sobering. 

The impact this reality made on my life has been long lasting. It taught me that in order to do meaningful work I need to embrace and understand that comfort is not always productive. It's nice to be comfortable, but if we peel back its layers, who is benefiting by it, and who is not? I also learned that oftentimes, I will know what to do as I go, rather than at the onset of a project, if I am intentional about seeking God's will for whatever the work entails. This knowing is best done in community with people who have been empowered to speak up for what they need, what they see, and what they do not see.

Anything else you'd like to share?

These days you'll find me raising my son and enjoying life as it is, rather than what I thought it would be. Happiness is sometimes a temporary notion, but God's joy is eternal. To follow us you can locate us on YouTube at It's Tomato's Mommy.


Alumni Profile: Patrick Kangrga

Name and pronouns:  Patrick Christopher Kangrga (he/him)

Cohort year: 2013-2014

Where are you living now? Jackson, Mississippi

What are you doing now? Lay Ministry; Director of Youth Ministries at St. James' Episcopal Church in Jackson, MS. 

How has Life Together impacted your Life?

I participated in two years of Episcopal Service Corps programs. My first year was in Maryland with the Gileads. Life Together followed. If my experience with the Gileads was like opening a door, then my experience with Life Together was like turning on the light switch in the room to which that door led. The Gilead's gave me opportunities and possibilities that, if I am honest, I thought would always be out of my reach. Life Together helped me to discern one of those possibilities as a life calling.  

Before going to Maryland, I had these two wonderings that I had put into the back of my mind, "What would it be like to be a priest or pastor?" and "What would it look like for me to have more meaningful involvement with children or youth in church?" I did not address these questions all that much at the time for two reasons. First, I had attempted a college degree and had failed at it. Second, I could not imagine that someone like myself would ever be acceptable or worthy of being a minister in the eyes of others or God. 

The benefit of my Life Together year was that it gave me more chances to gain experience. I learned from others and I learned about myself. I could try things and fail even miserably, knowing grace was abundant. Ultimately, this gift of failing with an abundance of grace was the true blessing I received from Life Together and the entirety of my ESC experience. I suspect a world without Life Together and ESC would have been far less gracious to me. And I think the old me, the person I was before Life Together and ESC, would have had little grace too. But the person I am today and the person I believe I continue to grow into sees the beauty of the story God was writing. How the chapters that came before gave birth to the chapters that followed and the one I am living now.  

Anything else you'd like to share?

There is no doubt in my mind that my experience in the Episcopal Service Corps and with Life Together has allowed me to live my best life. I have a career that I see as a calling. I love what I do to earn a living. I have been able to become more involved in the wider Episcopal Church. I have been a part of Forma, A Ministry of ECF, the Network for Christian Formation for the Episcopal Church and beyond for some time now. I joined Forma's leadership and recently became the Interim Chair. 

Also, I have been able to do things that I always wanted to do because of my career. I walked the Camino in Spain with some youth. Because I make a decent salary and am given vacation, I have gone to some of my top dream destinations like Florence and Rome, Italy. I learned to scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef. 

I have even been able to revive one of my earliest passions. I am a published author. Not a book yet but I have several devotionals, meditations and essays published related to my church work and faith life.

 

Finding Community Worth Fighting For by Lily Luo

Finding Community Worth Fighting For by Lily Luo

This past Sunday my partner and I attended a service at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Boston. We decided to attend because we had just started couples spiritual direction with Rev. Pam who is the rector there. In many ways the Episcopal Church is a funny home for us as a couple. She grew up and still identifies as part of the Roman Catholic Church while I grew up in Evangelical spaces and do not claim a specific Christian denomination as home right now. After the service, my partner told me that she noticed how for all the progressive leanings of the Episcopal Church, the service felt more Catholic than her simple Catholic service back in Münster, Germany.

Learnings & Liberation by Ricky Cintrón

Learnings & Liberation by Ricky Cintrón

A few months ago I started a new part time job with Our Bible app, the first LGBTQ-affirming, progressive Bible reader app for mobile devices, as their social media manager. My day-to-day routine involves designing social media posts, and reaching out to potential devotional writers, engaging with users via Twitter. But another aspect of my position that isn’t in my job description is pastoral care. Almost every day I hear from someone on Twitter or through email how they’re so excited to be able to engage with the Bible and read devotional material written by and for LGBTQ folks. Often coupled with these wonderful testimonials from other LGBTQ folks are stories of how the Bible was weaponized against them, how alienated they feel in church, or how they’re learning to trust family members again after coming out and being ostracized. I treat these stories with care, as holy things to be held. It’s something I didn’t really expect to be doing when I took the job, but I enjoy it immensely. My experiences with Life Together, both good and bad, have really prepared me to do this work.

"Messy but whole" by Waetie Sanaa Kumahia

"Messy but whole" by Waetie Sanaa Kumahia

I planned my move without any hesitation.  Now, my initial reason for moving to this location was a very superficial, of course, but thank goodness God always finds a way to work miracles out of whatever we offer her to work with.  In my case, I was thrown into my first experience with an intentional community—although no one there would have used that phrasing.

"Things that heal the world" by Lacresha Johnson

"Things that heal the world" by Lacresha Johnson

My experience with Life Together is intertwined in my life daily. In my role as a case manager for Boston Healthcare for the Homeless and in my home living with my roommates. Life Together taught me the importance of community, communication, compassion, and seeing God in everyone you meet. I work with some of the most amazing and challenging people I have ever met. I try to make every client I work with feel like they are apart of my community. Life Together has given me the strength and the patience to see past people's initial hesitancy to trust someone they don't know. I currently live with two of my roommates from the Life Together house I lived in and we still use some of our old house rules. We have weekly house dinners and meetings to keep connected.

"Celebrating the small wins" by Caroline Hunter

"Celebrating the small wins" by Caroline Hunter

One saying I learned in the Life Together program has been echoing through my head this fall, six years after I started my year at 40 Prescott Street: "Your calling is to work where your greatest desire and the world's deepest need intersect." 

Even as an employee at a 70,000-strong technology corporation, and as an MBA student a little halfway past done with my degree, this phrase speaks urgently to me. I have not figured out what I want to do with my life. Sometimes the world's tragedies still seem so many - war, racism, sexual violence, mental illness, hunger, lack of upward mobility, political gridlock - that I question what my desire and prayers for peace can ever accomplish. Yes, I want to be a person whose faith draws her to righteous, loving action. But when I'm running back and forth between a high tech office during the day and income statements at night, that kind of action admittedly feels unreachable.

"Living out the dream" by Paul Daniels

"Living out the dream" by Paul Daniels

Paul is currently a student minister, student, and activist at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. 

"When I left Morehouse I knew that I wanted to live out the dream of my Morehouse brother Martin Luther King, Jr., that I, too, wanted to march and fight and preach the Good News into life. Life Together helped shape me into someone who can do that in innumerable ways: in the classroom, in the streets, in the pulpit, in those awesome moments with a stranger who gets it, in the silence..."

Where Are They Now: Alum (2009) Megan Anderson

Where Are They Now: Alum (2009) Megan Anderson

In my 12 months of Life Together I grew from a shy California girl, who wanted nothing more than to follow the rules and blend into the walls, into a woman who stepped up to claim her voice and calling in a community of people doing the same. During my time at Life Together, I worked for the Trinity Education for Excellence program. I also worked on a community organizing team, served on the Trinity Copley Square Altar Guild, and worshipped with the Crossing Community.

Where Are They Now? Reflection by Alum Hazel Johnson

Where Are They Now? Reflection by Alum Hazel Johnson

I came to Life Together in 2011 with a desire to find a place where I could be accepted and made to feel strong and bold. Well, all the fear and anxiety about not being accepted flew out the window when I walked in the first day and saw Arrington standing there in a collar! I remember turning to someone and asking, “is that a woman?” I wasn’t confused about her gender; I was shocked to see my first woman priest. Growing up Southern Baptist, the closest I could ever get was being a preacher’s wife, but this opened up a new world. In that moment my world broke open. In that moment I saw possibilities that were at one point just dream.