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December 15, 2022
Office of Public Affairs

Episcopal Church Young Adult Service Corps opens applications for 2023-24

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry talks about the value of the Young Adult Service Corps / El Obispo Presidente Michael Curry habla sobre el valor del Cuerpo de Servicios de Jóvenes Adultos

When program alumni were asked recently if they would recommend a year of international mission engagement through The Episcopal Church’s Young Adult Service Corps (YASC), they answered resoundingly: Yes!

“I would do YASC again and again, if offered a chance,” said the Rev. Ranjit Mathews, who spent 2001-02 in Cape Town, South Africa, serving in the HIV/AIDS office of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. “It changed my life, opened me to God, to vocation, to new challenges within myself and in the world.”

For more than two decades, YASC has offered Episcopalians ages 21-30 the opportunity to follow Jesus’ way of love into deeper relationship with God and the global Anglican Church while spending a year living and working with communities around the world.

Applications are now being accepted for 2023-24 placements; the deadline to apply online is Feb. 1. Selected applicants will be invited to an in-person discernment retreat at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York, March 22-26; final candidates will attend a two-week cross-cultural orientation session in June.

YASC participants typically serve in the areas of administration/communication, agriculture, community development, education, health care, parish ministry/chaplaincy, social services, and youth work, among other ministries. They participate in the daily life and ministry of churches and cathedrals around the Anglican Communion.

“My YASC year completely changed the direction of my career and life,” said Keri Geiger, a registered nurse and doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing who served in Hawston, South Africa, in 2013-14. “I entered YASC at a time when I was ready to leave the profession of nursing. Instead, I found my calling.”

Keri Geiger, right, holding box, served with HOPE Africa in Hawston, South Africa, during her YASC year in 2013-14.

Deeply impacted by the lack of basic health services she saw in low- and middle-income countries—and working for the first time with people living with HIV—Geiger desired to provide healthcare in humanitarian settings. She joined Doctors Without Borders after YASC, working in four African countries during armed conflict, infectious disease outbreaks, and refugee crises. Her current dissertation research focuses on people living with HIV and drug-resistant tuberculosis in—“you might have guessed it,” Geiger said—South Africa.

“Serving people in crisis by providing high-quality, compassionate healthcare has become the driving purpose of my life,” she said. “Every day that I’m in the field, I get to live out my baptismal covenant to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.

“I would never have found this calling without YASC,” she said.

Keri Geiger, back row, second from left, in Chad with a Doctors Without Borders medical team in January 2022.

Twelve years before Geiger, Mathews—who is canon for mission advocacy, racial justice, and reconciliation, for the Episcopal Church in Connecticut—also served his YASC year with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, working as assistant to the canon missioner to the province for HIV/AIDS.

The Rev. Ranjit Mathews.

“My YASC experience had a profound impact on my life,” he said. “Serving in Cape Town at the cathedral during the ravages of HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa helped me see the levels of human suffering I had been shielded from as a middle-class U.S. citizen, while also witnessing the actions of the Anglican church to care for all those affected.”

Among many memorable experiences that year—including being at St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town during the 9/11 terrorist attacks—was an invitation for Mathews to dine one evening with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his wife, Leah.

“He has always been a faith leader I looked to for inspiration and integrity,” Mathews said. “It was an incredible experience I will never forget.”

Mathews was recently elected to be the clergy representative of The Episcopal Church to the Anglican Consultative Council. “I know that my experience as a YASCer in Cape Town has made me a leader who listens first, asks questions out of curiosity, and, I hope, is more reflective and understanding of the complexity of the Anglican experience in different parts of the world,” he said.

Mitchell Honan—who is canon for finance and property for the Episcopal Diocese of South Dakota—spent 2016-17 with YASC in Haiti, where he taught English at two Episcopal schools, among other tasks.

“The experience that I had with YASC changed my life,” he said. “I had been on a track to work in financial investing, and I could see at that time that it was not what I wanted. YASC gave me the chance to try something that I hoped I would be good at, and to break with the path I sensed myself to be on.”

Spencer Cantrell is director of federal affairs at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. She credits her YASC time in Hong Kong from 2010-11, advocating for migrant domestic workers, with setting her on her career path.

“YASC was an incredibly formative experience,” she said. “I learned countless lessons about being of service to others and what advocacy and client empowerment means.”

Her time in the program also strengthened her faith. “I think a lot of this was through challenging my faith in ways it hadn’t been previously,” she said, noting the horrific suffering many of her clients had been through. “I also came to have a different understanding of the church’s role in justice.”

Amanda Akes-Cardwell also served with YASC the same year as Cantrell, working for HOPE Africa, the social development arm of the Anglican Church in Southern Africa. She now works as missioner for faith formation and development for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. Like Cantrell, she saw her faith grow during those months.

“Leaving my country, community, and context behind in order to serve in YASC created space within me to rely more fully on God,” she said. “The more I relied on God, the more I discovered about God, the more I grew in relationship with God. At the same time, I was forming new friendships and learning new cultures. I was being formed throughout it all into a more aware and adept person and leader in ways that I can’t imagine happening had I not participated in YASC.”

Since the start of YASC, young adults have served in 41 countries, and, in 2023, placements may include, but not be limited to, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, England, France, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania.

Cantrell noted that YASC might naturally attract young adults discerning a clergy call, but emphasized that the program offers much more.

“There are such a variety of jobs and opportunities that folks can do in YASC to help them discern a variety of vocations,” she said. “I would encourage anyone who wants to explore how God calls them to walk humbly with God and love their neighbor like themselves to consider the opportunity and see whether it might be a good fit.”

Learn more about YASC.