A Companis Journey - Connections

My Companis journey began as a series of connections.  It started with Donna Beth Blythe, of all places.  The Sunday I became a member of Seattle First Baptist Church (which houses Companis), I read a piece I wrote about my grandmother from the pulpit.  Craig Darling, the Pastor for Call and Vocation and Executive Director of Companis, approached me after the service, and I learned that he had known my grandmother.  That spurred our conversation about Companis, and me becoming a Companis worker.

When I met with Craig and Gary, we talked about my goals as an educator.  How I had learned I needed to be somewhere where I would build long-term relationships with students, the environmental piece could be put on hold for now.  I wanted to work with older students, not elementary aged anymore.  I wanted to get back to the demographics of Fraser kids, at risk youth who need the extra level of support and guidance, because for many reasons related to systematic oppression, that support is lacking elsewhere in their lives.  I mentioned Seattle Education Access (SEA), because I had learned about it from Charlie (my friend from IW), but we weren't sure if it was the right fit yet.

When we looked into it and realized it was actually the perfect fit, Craig and Gary had me come in to SEA with them for a meeting with Anthon and Sarah.  Everyone was looking at my resume when Sarah's eye caught the educational experience section, and I learned that she was also an Earlham English major.

Family, IslandWood, Earlham; I felt there were pieces of my life nudging me along this path I was leaning into curiously.  I started to sink into that feeling of being exactly where I was supposed to be.

That was the beginning of my journey, noticing and receiving the connections.  Now I'm three months in my year of service with SEA.  In my opinion, SEA is a gracious space, a term we've been talking about from Bill Graves book, Sharing the Rock.

SEA logo www.seattleeducationaccess.org

To me, SEA is a gracious place, because it is a place where we practice saying yes.  At SEA, students hear, "Yes, you can go to school.  Here's how..."  SEA is a gracious space, because it is a place of genuine checks-in and debriefs.  I hear the honest truth about others' lives, and share how I am really feeling, through the positive, and the hardships.  SEA is a place where the powers that be spend more time figuring out how to support the people under them, than how to milk them for capital value.

SEA is a place where people see the value in things that can't be measured.  I've had conversations with my bosses and co-workers about how part of our job is to show up and be present.  This means sitting at a drop-in site for weeks before the students feel used to you and ask for help with homework, this means sitting patiently through the silence with students as they work through decisions.  These moments of building something is important work.

My time at SEA is going to be split 50/50 between admin work and tutoring.  The tutoring has been a scary and exciting experience. I've spent the last two years focusing on large group management.  The curriculum I've worked with has either been for 5th grade and younger, or has been after school workshops.  Sitting down with adult students to show them how to do algebra, geometry, calculus, or write a paper was a terrifying feeling at first.

Although I don't remember calculus yet, I really love tutoring at the middle, high school, and even college levels!  So far, my tutoring experience at SEA is helping me realize I do want to be a teacher someday, and I have what it takes to teach math, science, English, maybe even history at the adolescent age level.