• Where’s home?

I grew up in Orange, California. While I have lived in a handful of other places, I still consider that to be my home.

• Where did you go to school and what did you study?

I graduated from Willamette University in 2017 with a degree in politics and Spanish.

• Where did you serve as a volunteer and what was your ministry?

I was a volunteer in Urban Servant Corps during the 2017-2018 year, and I served as a tutor at a high school for pregnant and parenting teens. I also served as an AmeriCorps VISTA member at the Community Action Partnership in Lancaster, Pennsylvania during the 2018-2019 year.

• What is your role at CVN and what are you most looking forward to in this new position?

I’ll be the Recruitment Associate at CVN for the 2019-2020 school year. I’m really excited to meet and work with graduating college students. That’s such an exciting and wild season of life and I feel really honored to be able to walk with people through that process even briefly.

• What motivates you?

I’m mostly motivated by a belief in collective responsibility. I have a sense that the lack of justice in the world and the relatively high level of privilege that I have call me to a particular kind of work in the world. Every day I try to build a little more justice and do a little less harm.

• Imagine you are stuck in an elevator. Who would you most like to be stuck with? Why?

Am I allowed to say my entire Urban Servant Corps house? I’m not particularly comfortable in elevators, so I think if I was stuck in one I would want to be with people whom I loved and trusted and felt good around. Plus, it’s proven difficult to plan a reunion for us, so maybe we could finally all be together in this fictional elevator.

• Share an interesting fact about you:

I’m actually a pretty good welder! In college, I worked in our campus theater building sets, and I learned how to cut and weld steel. I think it’s my most impressive skill.

• Favorite quote:

I love a good podcast, and one of my favorites is Joanna Macy’s episode of On Being. In it, she describes the experience of looking at her hands, and she says, “This hand is directly linked to hands that learned to reach and grasp and climb and push up on dry land and weave reeds into baskets, and it has a fantastic history. Every particle and every atom in this hand goes back to the beginning of space-time. We’re part of that story.” I think about that a lot.

• What book should everyone read? Why?

My favorite piece of writing is a short story called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” which is in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters by Ursula Le Guin. The story is broadly about the ways we might be implicated in injustice in the world and the actions we might take in order to respond to that. Mostly I love it because since it’s set in a fantasy-ish kind of place, there are infinite ways to relate to it and place yourself in it, leading to all kinds of ways it could be calling you to respond.