YouthWorks Staff Communitas: Why it is so fulfilling to be in community

This post is written by Katie Synder who is a YouthWorks Alumni Staff.

I would guess that I am not unlike most prior YouthWorks staff who have never reunited with their whole team from their summer with YW; however, since my college has not had many YW staff over the past few years, I have felt isolated from a community that I unknowingly longed for until this past week.

I was privileged to talk to Peter, one of the YW recruiters, this week while he was recruiting at my college, which led to helping out at the Jubilee Conference over the weekend with him and Sam, another recruiter. Although I was allowed to attend the seminars and large group sessions at the conference, I chose to spend most of my time with Sam and Peter at the YW recruiting table because they provided me with a sense of community that I have been missing out on since my summer with YW a year and a half ago.

This newly recognized sense of community that I am talking about is described well in an article titled, “Not Community, Communitas,” by Rev. Michael Frost, who describes communitas as the sense of community that is achieved when we are in a “liminal state” – a place of transition – that is neither home nor another permanent place. Everyone who has completed a summer as a staff with YouthWorks has communitas with one another because we were in a place that was not our home nor a permanent residence doing tough things that stretched us and made us rely on our team. The YouthWorks communitas stretches beyond our own teams because we have shared experiences from buying at least four flatbeds-worth of food at Sam’s Club and wearing close-foot shoes in the kitchen and having weeks where (almost) everything went perfectly and weeks where absolutely nothing went as planned.

Spending the weekend with Sam and Peter brought back great memories I had from my summer with YouthWorks. But it also brought back the feeling I had when I first returned from my summer with YW— that no one back home or at school fully understood my experience because they hadn’t done it themselves. As time went on, that feeling of frustration went away and my summer with YW became merely words on my resume even though it had an enormous impact on who I am. So now I am recognizing how much of an impact the YouthWorks communitas matters in order to remember and be thankful for the experiences I had with YW and how it has shaped me.

So here’s what I want to say to alumni: Be a part of the communitas! Encourage a fellow alum who you know. Share stories that you haven’t told in a while. Support one another in where they are going and remind them of their growth through YouthWorks.