Emmaus House Fellowship
Emmaus House is an Episcopal inner city neighborhood center which has been in existence 42 years. Before the current recession, the child poverty rate was 53% and unemployment was 37%.
Emmaus House comprises a variety of programs including Summer Day Camps for 150, Middle School Arts Camp for 20, Walk in Help and Advocacy Center with 85 contacts/day, Senior Day program for 25. We are also partners in the Peoplestown neighborhood and thus involved in community redevelopment and justice issues.
Fellowship Description:
Beatitudes Society Summer 2011 Fellow would participate fully in staff meetings and in Sunday worship, taking leadership as desired. During the week the Fellow would work full-time either in the summer day camps for elementary children or serving as the primary support person for the Middle School Arts Program (3 x week) as well as assisting in the programs of the walk-in help center.
Our Summer Day Camps are being re-shaped and will involve more partnerships between professional educators and volunteers. In 2010 our Middle School Arts Camp in partnership with Kennesaw State University had as its theme, “My Place” and was in part a community organizing learning experience where participants were exposed through the arts to issues in the neighborhood, its history and their capacity to express their own hopes and concerns through photography, mapping, digital story telling, theater and dance.
The Fellow would have the opportunity to attend community meetings (where much community organizing is done) and work one or more days per week, in the Muriel Lokey Center, our walk in help center. In both settings, as well as in the summer camp programs, the Fellow would learn about issues facing our community and poor people in Metro-Atlanta.
Emmaus House will invite the Fellow to take one issue and do research and advocacy around it. (For example, the Fellow might choose to investigate why Fulton County does not return ID to inmates when they are released from jail. S/he could then speak to Fulton County officials about changing this practice. S/he could write a letter to the editor on behalf of Emmaus House, etc.) The Fellow would have many collaborators in this work at Emmaus House and in the community to identify resources, stakeholders, and policy makers around a variety of issues including: education, access to government assistance, housing, land use, and economic development.
Skills Required:
1. A team player
2. Easy ability to relate to all sorts of people from a range of backgrounds
3. An open curiosity about situations which may be very new and a commitment to openly question their assumptions.
4. Experience and enjoyment working with children and youth.
5. The capacity to initiate and self-schedule, to be held accountable, and to ask others for what is needed to do the work.
6. Interest in the interplay between to social change efforts and programs to alleviate suffering.
7. Flexibility.
8. A sense of humor.
9. Faithful tolerance.
Unique opportunities:
The Fellow would spend time with people who, some for generations, have crossed lines of race and class in order to find the servant Christ in one another. The Fellow would “learn by doing” about of the ins and outs of a variety of different kinds of programs. The Fellow would be invited to the neighborhood meetings and any other events held in Atlanta which would help enrich their understandings. Finally, the Fellow would be working in a faith-based center with hard-working professionals and partners, including those with some expertise in leading worship, communications, and varieties of service, and who have hosted experiential learning opportunities for 40 + years.
Click here to learn more about Emmaus House