Recent Wheaton College graduate and Savior attendee, Katherine Beech, is working as an intern at Urban Impact Foundation and shares how the Lord called her to be his hands & feet in Pittsburgh.
Katherine, what is Urban Impact Foundation?
Urban Impact Foundation is a Christian missionary organization that has been serving the youth of Pittsburgh’s North Side for 25 years. Through programs in Education, Athletics, Performing Arts, and Options (preparing students for life after high school), Urban Impact aims to form relationships with students, help them grow, and share the gospel.
Explain your internship role? And how did you connect with this opportunity to serve others?
A friend did a summer internship at Urban Impact and told me all about how the mission and the people there were amazing. I was looking for an opportunity to combine education and ministry in an urban context, so I applied for an internship in the Education Department at Urban Impact. After only a month here, it feels really clear that this is where I am supposed to be for the next seven months until I start graduate school.
In light of school being completely virtual for the 2020-2021 school year, Urban Impact has started a new program called Learning Labs to provide a safe place and conducive learning environment for students to come and do their schoolwork. With other staff and volunteers, I help students log onto their virtual classes, get any materials the student may need, and fix any technical problems that come up. We also learn the students' schedules, engage them in conversation about what they are learning, and help them study for assessments. This program is especially helpful to the families whom Urban Impact serves due to the high number of students whose guardians work during the school day and cannot afford childcare. Every student is provided breakfast and lunch, and many of the students are driven to Learning Labs by me and other staff.
During your time in Pittsburgh thus far, what have you enjoyed most about the city and its culture?
Pittsburgh is the most Midwest/East Coast city I have ever been to! Despite being located in the eastern part of the United States, people here tend to have a more Midwest friendliness and operate at a slower pace than D.C. or New York. Pittsburgh has the crazy road system of the East Coast (not the grid system of the Midwest) but people here say the midwestern word “pop” instead of soda. Pittsburgh also has a slang of its own, with words like “yinz” instead of y’all.
What has surprised you so far as you have started to work in an urban context?
One part of why I wanted to work at Urban Impact was to gain more diverse teaching experiences. Although I have a lot of experience teaching and working with kids, 90% of that experience is with white, suburban, middle-class-and-up kids. Working in a majority black urban context for the first time has been a two-way street of getting to know my students and them getting to know me. Many of my students have names that I am not familiar with, and I have to hear their names multiple times and ask how names are spelled. I was not surprised about this, I assumed that learning new and different names would be part of entering a new context. What surprised me was that the challenge was mutual, as I found out in a conversation with one of my students, Jayla. I had never met anyone with the name Jayla before, and Jayla had never met anyone named Katherine before. She asked me to repeat it several times and to spell it.
Part of Jayla’s unfamiliarity with my name is because she is in second grade, and I am not saying that all of my students had the trouble she did. But later I reflected on how I was not surprised that my students' names would be hard for me, but I was surprised that my name was hard for them. Is my surprise a normal reaction to the fact that up to this point I have only been in contexts where everyone was familiar with the name Katherine? Or is that me assuming that “black” names are not “normal” and “white” names like Katherine are “normal”? Please pray for me that my time working with these amazing kids would be a time of rooting out unconscious bias.
When did you graduate from Wheaton College, and what did you study?
I graduated in December with a B.A. in Elementary Education, a minor in Biblical and Theological Studies, an Elementary teaching license, and an endorsement in teaching Middle Grade Mathematics.
While studying at Wheaton College you attended Savior, what did you love most about your time with us?
I was drawn to Savior because it is an Anglican church with women priests, and I stayed because Savior felt like family! Whether I was at a church service, a college dinner, or a socially distanced out-door gathering, I always felt that I was loved and cared for. I tell everyone who will listen about how great Church of the Savior is!
How can we keep in touch with you, supporting you with prayer, or to contribute financially to your kingdom work?
Email me at kbeech518@gmail.com! I will put you on my email list so that you can receive my newsletters, which have more information about what I am doing, prayer requests, and the link to partner with me financially.
Photo: Katherine with one of her students in the Learning Labs, Lanae, who is proudly displaying her math work. (She and her parent have given permission to share this photo).