Hello, and welcome to another Pivot Northwest podcast. Today's podcast is a short and sweet, but important conversation. As you may have heard, Pivot Northwest is expanding to Pace Northwest, and we wanted to talk a little bit about what that means exactly. You may also notice that our website is getting a facelift.
And as part of that, we have a cool new podcast logo. So I wanted to highlight that and give a quick shout out to SPU student Kaylee Vo, who is our graphic designer. Kaylee is also helping out with our social media. And we're really lucky to have her on the team.
So thanks, Kaylee. And now, without further ado, let's get to our discussion. Pivot to Pace. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another Pivot Northwest podcast.
I am Lauren Patti, the content manager for Pivot Northwest. And today I am joined by Jeff Cus, who is our executive director, and Martine Jimenez, the program director. We're just going to have a little informal conversation here about Pivot Northwest and our expansion to Pace Northwest. So you want to say hello, fellas?
Hi, everybody. Hey, Internet world. So as I mentioned, Pivot Northwest is kind of expanding its programming a little bit, and we are developing this thing called Pace Northwest. And we knew that there are probably some questions around that.
So we wanted to open up the conversation by discussing the distinctions between Pivot and Pace. So Jeff, can you start us off there? Kind of what is Pace Northwest and what's the distinction between Pivot and Pace? Yeah, thanks, Lauren.
In 2016, we were approached by the Lilly Endowment to begin a project alongside with other what are called hubs or educational institutions across the country to do research and reflection on innovation for young adults. That five year project came to an end. And that was for us what was called Pivot Northwest, the work that we did working alongside a number of churches on the I-5 corridor, also doing national and regional research on both quantitative and qualitative research to help to better serve young adults in their time. Lilly approached us again in 2020 about doing a next phase of our work, which is now going to be expanded to five years, another five years, which has become Pace Northwest.
And so Pace stands for preparation, activism, church and engagement. And so each of those four building blocks are aspects of an expansion of the work we did in the first phase of Pivot, where we got to know young adults, got to know what their hungers, their pain, their joys were and how congregations serve them. And now we're going to go public with what we've learned, create new partners and new ways of working with young adults and also larger bodies to tell the story of how better equipped young adults for the work that we have before them. Great.
Thanks. So basically what we're saying is that Pivot Northwest isn't really going away. We're just developing more programs in more ways for us to do our work and to spread our knowledge. Does that sound true?
Yeah. And I would say that one way to put it, Martine can follow up on this, is that we're basically renovating the house. So we're still living at the same address. Mail is still coming to us here.
The foundation is still Pivot, but what we're building is some new rooms and actually a bigger deck to invite more people to. That is such an appropriate analogy for Seattle today. For anyone who's tried to get a contractor. But yeah, we're definitely going to hold more parties.
And yeah, it's funny. I was thinking about this question that you posed, Lauren. You could really tell the difference in the way that we designed the sort of artistic representation of how it's changed. So if you look at the Pivot Northwest icons on our front page, it's the five things you can start doing right now to engage young adults.
The icons are a little static, you know, and really we're just kind of how do we make a really quick read for the sort of the concepts visually that we really want people to take home. But then we were thinking about pace. It just felt like what we were really wanting to embody is action and movement and engagement, which is, of course, the E in pace. But you'll notice the icons are all kind of leaning forward together.
They're marching. They're going in a church. They're coming out of church. They're relating.
And, you know, I was thinking that one of the things we learned is young adults really just want the church to do something. They just really want the church to try something. They really want to learn more about themselves, more about the intergenerational community in their church. What are the values that they all hold or that they have to kind of negotiate, maybe if they're kind of different?
And how do they move forward as a community? And so I think that we did so much listening in the first one, and we've been itching to get out there and to just affirm the instincts that churches have of where they should be going. And for churches that are like, we're not even sure where to start, to just give them a whole bunch of starting places and then just tell them, Hey, go, go do it. You know, go fail or succeed.
Just be faithful. And in, in those failures and successes, as people can sometimes want to put that binary on it, what, what the real reward will be is, is creating those relationships and kind of learning more about why you're called to that community, you know, what, what God is calling you to. And so, so I'm just encouraged that we'll be able to kind of open the floodgates of encouragement and push churches to, to go and do things and try things out and learn about themselves and learn about their young people. Yeah, that's great.
And Martine, while we're on you, do you have a favorite memory from the past five years of Pivot's work? I have many. How much time do we have? No, I was thinking about it and I was, I mean, I don't know if it's a favorite memory, but it's one that I think about fondly because it just says so much about where we're at right now.
It was March 8th when we were down in Portland. Lauren, you were on that trip, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, it was, it was the three of us.
And then Gabriel was there and maybe, I forget who else was there, but we were down there working with Park Lane CRC and we weren't even sure if we should go down. I remember we were close to canceling it because Seattle was where the pandemic was really first kind of heating up. And we're like, you know, if we don't do it now, we don't know when we will be able to do it. It might be months.
I mean, it turns out it could have been years. But I remember looking at Instagram and all these churches that we were engaged with working, they were all so quickly onto YouTube and Facebook and Zoom. And it was really because they're young adults were just like, yeah, I'm a digital native. Yes, I know how to do it.
This is how you do it. And it just felt like all these young adults we knew were like helping their parents program their VCRs, you know, like that's kind of an analogy for the Gen Xers, but and the older millennials. But this, this massive shift was happening and the churches that were already engaged in the young adults had all these sort of experts in house already on, on how to be a digital community. And so it was just a really, it was kind of a moment of pride of like, wow, look at how sort of ready these churches were to adapt to a really important, you know, moment in our, in our history, in our collective history, in our shared history.
So that was a really, I will never probably forget that moment. And that's one of many, but yeah, that's probably something I'll even keep bringing up as we do our work because it's just so poignant. Yeah. What about you, Jeff?
Do you have a favorite memory? Yeah. And like Martine, I have quite a few, but they're often small things that happened. So maybe two just briefly.
One is our first big gathering we had with our churches in the very beginning here on campus at First Reformed Methodist church across the street and standing in the buffet line with a number of pastors and priests who have very different views on sexuality, politics, economics, just war. I mean, we had churches where they, you know, a number of their congregants come from the military background. Others are open and affirming, very progressive congregations. And they were all gathering food together and sitting and talking to you at the table.
And that's just a beautiful memory of me as this really open table that we were able to create because we were this middle space that wasn't stuck in one church tradition, but we could celebrate a lot of different churches and, and and think together about how to serve God's people together. And another memory is when we were with one of our churches that had just come back from a justice trip that they took down to the south to civil rights areas. And they came back and built this huge display and then sitting outside in the courtyard, hearing them talk about how painful it was for young adults, particularly for black indigenous people of color to really be seen by some congregations and hearing both their voices of concern, but also their love for each other and their desire to make the churches a warm and accepting place. And so just to get to sit on the sidelines and watch how the young adults were actively making spaces for new voices.
Those would be two little memories that I'll always cherish. Yeah, those are good ones. Lots of good memories we've had over the past five years. Crazy that it's been so long now.
Well, Lauren, you got to give us one of your memories. Oh Exciting. What about you, Jeff? I'm really excited about our PACE Fellows program and our PACE mentors program.
Two parts of what we're doing is we're inviting young adults into cohorts to begin centering some conversations and build relationships that won't be bound by churches per se, but by some interests and some heart needs that young adults have. But also, I'm really excited about recruiting mentors and seeing, you know, what would it mean for older adults, seasoned adults to sit and listen to young adults? I mean, we're really trying to flip the script on what people think a mentor is, which is just a big like an ATM or something just kind of just spitting out money or spitting out, you know, knowledge, but more about what does it mean to have and train adults to sit and listen and be alongside young adults without necessarily having to have all the answers. And I think that's a change that's been needed for a long time as far as what we see mentors being.
And we're still very much in the infancy of what that even looks like. But we have a lot of collaborators, I think, can help us get there. So it's always at the stage of the game. I'm always antsy because I really want to meet all these great people that are going to be part of the program.
But as we saw in our last grant, you know, it takes years to develop these relationships and to kind of see some of these play out. So I'm trying to be patient to see who God's going to bring. I'm trying to be patient to see what's going to come, but I'm excited for those two groups in particular right now, at least. And perhaps those of you listening to this podcast, perhaps it's you who's going to come and join us in this work.
And we're excited to get to know you more. Beautiful segue, Lauren. That reminds me of the you guys remember when Lisa was in the astronomy space, like the where you look at the stars and there's a little light that shines down on the benches. It could be you.
It could be you. Or it could be you. And she's like, oh, it's me. And she saw it as a sign and she runs out of the planetarium or whatever.
And then it says, who will reset my my program? Will it be you? Will it be you? Or will it be you?
Anyways, that's another one. Another analogy for the Gen X millennials recording there. But probably an apt one because really this work touches everyone. Right.
I mean, that's kind of what we were just talking about. Like, it's not just for young adults. It's not just for older adults. It's not just for leaders.
It's really for the entire sort of vertical structure of the church. And it's synergistic, right? Like the more people it touches, the more it builds, the more it. And for those of you who are wondering, yes, we literally have research about that.
So, yeah. Well, that feels like a good place to kind of wrap it up there. So thank you both for joining me and having this good, quick little discussion about PACE. I'm really excited to see where this leads.
I know that both of you are too. And thank you all for listening to our discussion. And we will look forward to connecting with you more as our programs develop here. So catch you next time.
Bye. Bye, everybody. Thank you for listening to this PIVOT Northwest podcast. We hope it was encouraging, inspiring, and helpful.
Please do all the things that help others to know about our work, such as liking, subscribing, reviewing, rating. But mostly, we hope that you will share this with other young adults and young adult leaders so that they can feel encouraged and inspired in their faith and participation in the church. God bless.