The cheerful flyer with colorful graphics of winter hats, socks, and mittens invited Portland-area youth to spend an afternoon with the Youth Service Corps (YSC), shopping for warm accessories at Marden’s, followed by a visit to St. Elizabeth’s Jubilee Center to donate their purchases and help organize other items for the center’s clients. Thirteen kids from five different worship communities turned out on that October Sunday, drawn by the opportunity to make an impact by helping others.
Now a chartered, ecumenical organization with 10 member congregations and a part-time, paid coordinator, the YSC was born out of the Rev. Peter Swarr’s efforts to form a youth group at Trinity Church in Portland, where he has served as rector since 2020. “We would struggle to get five kids to show up,” Swarr says. One of the parents suggested that since high-school students need community service hours to graduate, “why don’t we create some kind of service program where kids can bring their friends?” Swarr reached out to leaders at St. Alban’s in Cape Elizabeth, as well as Williston-Immanuel United Church, and the non-denominational HopeGateWay—both in Portland—to launch a monthly outreach project, where the kids got to decide how to spend the $1,000 budget.
Swarr ran the program until it and Trinity had grown to a point where he needed to step aside. Funded by $900 in annual dues from each YSC-member worship community, Amber Burks, a veteran educator, parishioner, and youth group leader at St. Alban’s was brought on board last summer as coordinator. With input from the kids, she now decides where to focus their outreach. In addition to purchasing winter outwear for St. Elizabeth’s, projects last year included packing warmth kits for Maine Needs, packaging measured ingredients for apple-cinnamon oatmeal and macaroni and cheese to make 10,000 easy-to-prepare meals for area food pantries, and volunteering with the Animal Refuge League of Greater Portland. Each event has attracted between 15 and 17 young people. Program costs are paid by the Beloved Community Fund, an endowment with post-Civil War origins administered by Trinity, HopeGateWay, and Williston-Immanuel.
“If you create an opportunity to make a difference, they’ll show up—they don’t want just pizza and frisbee,” says St. Alban’s Rector, the Rev. Joshua Hill. Like Swarr, Hill has experience as a youth minister; he also recalls his own teenage years in the church with fondness. “Generationally, we share a disappointment in the lack of investment that our denomination makes in young people,” Hill says. “We have young people desperate for meaning and belonging and the church needs them.” Another reality for today’s teenagers is that “in our digital world young people do not go to mixed spaces,” says Hill. “You have to create a space with a particular focus, and we think service does this.”
Episcopal Diocese of Maine Faith Formation Director Emily Keniston first interacted with YSC as a mom and parishioner at St. Peter’s. “What I sense both professionally and as a parent, is that our young people are asking for ways to live their faith,” she says. “Their faith is an authentic expression of their relationship with God. It’s alive and it’s action.”
As Keniston became more familiar with the YSC, Hill reached out to discuss expanding the program by sharing aspects that churches outside of greater Portland can easily replicate. These include logistical resources such as permission slips and other forms, ways to work with the community to determine where the needs are, and the model of ecumenical partnership.
“It’s always going to depend on geography,” says Swarr of the potential for churches in other parts of Maine to mirror what Portland-area congregations have done with the YSC. “When we met up at Marden’s, for instance, none of the churches had to drive more than 15 minutes”. He sees the YSC as an example of the hub-and-spoke model; by contributing $900, member churches “get actionable, doable things that they can use to develop their own youth programming. That’s valuable.”
Swarr, Keniston, and Hill all point to the value of the YSC not only for young people, but for the church at large in Maine, and perhaps even beyond. “YSC creates a mechanism for stable, consistent, sustainable, and interconnected youth programming that reflects the heart of our faith: serving others and living as people who serve on behalf of others,” says Swarr. “That’s often the most compelling part of what we have to offer as Episcopalians, and kids are going to be far more moved by that than sitting down and talking about the Nicene Creed.”
Asked to recall a moment of which he is especially proud, Swarr mentions a successful team building game led by St. Elizabeth’s board chair Gus Goodwin last fall, and this winter’s snowtubing outing, which attracted 40 kids. Both are memorable because of the bonds they helped build between young people of different faiths, united by the same mission. “To have that number, and to see the kids realize, “Hey, there’s that many of us connected to churches,” Swarr says of the snowtubing excursion. That connection may be where the real value lies. “This program is putting adults who care about them and this mission together with other teens who have that same desire,” says Keniston. “That combination is the church.”