Jesuit Volunteer Corps

You know what I mean? I went to Georgetown.

I went, after Georgetown I did a thing called the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.

It was like Domestic Peace Corps.

And then I went to law school, graduated from Yale Law School, had a, you know, senior executive vice president of a major bank, started my own law firm, was on dozens of different boards.

But anyway, all to say that my writing has guided a lot of my own journey and certainly my love of creativity and creative process.

But, you know, I was raised in an agnostic home and it wasn't until I went to university at a Jesuit college in New York City called Fordham University, where I It wasn't even until my last year there that I stumbled into the campus ministry office because I wanted to join the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.

And I laugh because their principles of JVC, their four principles are simplicity, social justice, community, and then spirituality.

And spirituality, I remember going into the campus ministry office saying, I can get behind the other three, but I just don't know about this spirituality thing.

And, you know, not to say I wasn't a spiritual or thoughtful person before then, but I hadn't yeah, I didn't have a framework for it.

I didn't, I hadn't really engaged in it that way.

And, you know, that sort of sent me on, the campus minister sent me on a retreat and I ended up joining the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and moving to California.

So my early experience of spiritual practice was really rooted in Ignatian tradition and very much connected to justice work and social service kind of work.

That was part of my life.

And in fact, after college, I did a year in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps where you make a commitment to social justice and to community and to a year of simplicity and doing social justice work.

So I did do that.

So it was always in my background and my core.

At this time of year, we're getting in our new year-long volunteers.

We have two of them from the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, Joanna and Allie, who will be working with us to man our food pantry and our volunteer coordination for the next year.

Mary was also in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps when she got out of college, and so we

are always

predisposed to such volunteering.

She says, make sure they have a moose wood cookbook, because that is what the Jesuit Volunteer Corps uses to make their meals, which they need to do on a budget, because they all live in a little group home together and work together while they do their volunteering for a year or two at organizations like the Father McKenna Center.

And that's really how we operate.

Most of our labor is provided on an unpaid basis.

I applied to the Peace Corps, got turned down, applied to US Voluntary Services, I think got turned down.

The Jesuits were running a volunteer organization called Jesuit Volunteers.

I applied for a job, wanted to go to New Mexico.

They called me June in 1975 and said, we have an opening in a place called Spokane, Washington, running the Peace and Justice Center.

You know, I made it through Georgetown, I made it through...

I went to, I did a thing called the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, which is like a domestic Peace Corps, um, f- for when I graduated, um, college.

And then, um, and then I came back to do law school.

At Yale, right?