Are YOU ready for a year of transformation?
What does it look like to live your values in the world? How do you challenge capitalism, racism, and environmental degradation, while also sustaining your spirit and maintaining meaningful relationships? If you’re asking these questions, you’ve come to the right place.
What to Expect
Art by Langley Hoyt, DC 2019-2020
Living Space:
YATC Collaborators are provided with housing for the duration of their term of service. Housing types vary by member locations, but all housing provides you with furnishings, kitchenware, and other related materials.
Intentional Community:
Collaborators will work together to draft a covenant, which will guide your life as a community, helping establish expectations around spiritual life, housekeeping responsibilities, and cultivating relationships with one another. In a hyper-individualistic culture, we ask you to lean into community, challenging yourself to dig into hard conversations and deep relationships.
Stipends:
You are provided with a monthly stipend to cover your food, transportation, house utilities, and living costs. It is expected that members of the intentional community pool their resources around food, transportation, and utilities to encourage that all community members have their needs met.
Local Partnership:
YATC Collaborators work with local site leadership to be placed with a local agency partner– a nonprofit, church, or advocacy group working in the pursuit of peace and justice. Your role at your agency partner is to be a good partner – you aren’t expected to solve the local issues that you face – you are expected to listen, and learn, and offer your gifts however you can. You will work 30-35 hours a week at your agency partner site.
Our Spirituality
What animates our work is the belief that we are better together. While YATC has its roots in Christian programs that follow the example of Jesus in loving our neighbor and confronting empire, we know that this background does not resonate with all who want to engage in transformational programs. Therefore we ask collaborators to be open to their “why” - their motivation and their connection to a call bigger than themselves that they seek to answer in this year.
Community Days:
Each member site sets aside a community day, an opportunity to dive deeper into focus areas, community development, or exploring local context. Some community days will be all-day excursions to important programmatic locations, while others will be guided reflections onsite.
Transportation:
Each member site has different expectations around transportation. Some sites rely on public transportation, while others allow you to bring a vehicle for ease of movement around the community.
Vocational Discernment:
Each member site provides numerous resources to help them engage in the sacred work of uncovering the movement of the Spirit in their lives. Our goal is that by the end of your term of service, you have built a toolbox of vocational discernment practices that can serve you for the rest of your life.
Job & Life Skills Development:
As a part of your term of service, you will gain valuable work experience with your local agency partner. As the year develops, you will work with site leadership to learn how to share your experience on your resume and ways to leverage your skills as you prepare for whatever may be next in your vocational journey.
We're not trying to tell you that service isn't important-- it will still be an important part of your time as a YATC collaborator-- but we ARE saying service isn't enough. Our agenda is to disrupt your life. We want to change and transform the way you see yourself in the world.
We want to help you better understand the scourge that is racism and your role in it. We want to challenge the way you interact with the environment, and encourage you to think deeply about your relationship with the earth. We want to give you tools for a lifetime of vocational discernment, questioning how to seek your passions in a capitalist culture that sees you as a commodity. This isn't just a year of service. This is a year to inform the rest of your life.
-YATC Program Site Coordinator
Strategic Intentions:
We seek to root ourselves in deep reciprocal relationships with local partners that guide our work, rejecting Doctrine of Discovery-inspired models of mission.
We invite, challenge, demand that young adults move from understanding systemic oppression with their minds into feeling, sensing, noticing the impacts of oppression and opportunities for liberation in their hearts, spirits, bodies, and communities.
Participating programs equip young adults to enter the workforce with an orientation toward justice, antiracism, and collective liberation.
Service/volunteering operates as a learning laboratory - where participating young adults can implement their learnings and skills, make mistakes in a supportive environment, learn together, and discern their call for future vocations.
(What are these? Strategic Intentions are one way YATC unites local programs in different places. As you participate in a local community, these strategic intentions will be part of the programming there in a context-appropriate way. What intentions will you bring to your transformation year?)
Interested in participating at one of these sites? Fill out our interest sheet here.
Applications open Jan 1, 2024
