Engage Your Equal

When I arrived in Kenya with the E.Y.E. program, it was nothing short of a dream come true. Every night I wrote in my journal: thank you, God, for giving me the deepest and greatest desire of my heart. And to Engage Your Equal? Wow. To look at every person on the program, encounter them, and learn to do that as an equal is transformative. This is what I learned to do in Kenya. The children there reminded me why I teach, and the young adults I still talk to months later continue to remind me of fervor and passion for ministry.

Thank you to the Diocese of Phoenix for this amazing experience. I now use Kenyan phrases in my classroom, teach my students parts of Kenyan culture, and educate the young adults in the Magnify Young Adult Ministry about what Catholic Social Teaching is and what it looks like internationally and right here in our backyard. But possibly the greatest thing I do nowadays? I engage my equal right here in Phoenix. I look people in the eye again, serve the poor on the street, the lonely in store lines, the strangers in our neighborhoods. Who knows? Some say those are the angels or even Christ among us.

The warm welcome, deep faith, culture, and way of life I experienced in Kenya left a profound impact on me. Since returning home to Phoenix from our Kenyan mission experience, I have presented key photos and impactful stories not only on a personal level with my family members, but also with Catholic Charities Executive and Philanthropy team members and the Young Catholic Professionals. I am currently collaborating with another Engage Your Equal cohort member, Marisa Lopez, to share highlights with interested seniors at Bourgade Catholic High School and invite the next generation to apply to Engage Your Equal.

In the months after returning from the 2025 Engage Your Equal program in Kenya, I have been giving back to my community by exploring and engaging with the Seven Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy. Every month, I am participating in two or three hands-on volunteer events with organizations like Andre House, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Sisters of Life, St. Vincent de Paul, Welcome to America Project, and Phoenix Dream Center. I volunteer across a range of events to support people experiencing homelessness and dealing with mental health and to advocate for causes like human trafficking recovery, foster care, and refugee assistance. Additionally, I am striving to give at least four talks sharing my experience in Kenya with the different communities I have been a part of. I plan to give talks at Bourgade Catholic High School (my alma mater), Arizona State University, which is my current college, and local young adult ministry groups. I hope to use my stories from Kenya to foster compassion and leadership in youth and young adults across our Diocese.

I am bringing my experience with the Engage Your Equal program in Kenya back to the Diocese of Phoenix through two main initiatives: advertising and speaking. I am focused on presenting E.Y.E. as an opportunity for young adults to grow in faith and service. I advertise E.Y.E. with a newly formed young adult group in my area, Prescott Young Catholics. To reach Catholic college students, I also promote E.Y.E. with the Embry Riddle University Newman group.

As Youth Minister at Sacred Heart Parish in Prescott, I am able to speak directly to the Sacred Heart Youth Group about the Church in Africa. I talk about my time in Kenya and experience of the Church there, and I teach the Youth Group about living out solidarity here in Phoenix with our brothers and sisters across the universal Church.

Over the past year, I’ve been working to bring Engage Your Equal to the Diocese of Phoenix by sharing its mission and impact with local parishes, especially my parish of St. Andrew the Apostle in Chandler. At St. Andrew’s, I led two educational talks in September in which I shared our team’s experiences in Kenya with parishioners and highlighted how faith and service intersect across cultures. In addition, I answered the call to serve as the Young Adult Faith Formation Lead at St. Andrew’s, a role that gives me the opportunity to help others grow in their spiritual journeys through community and conversation. I also gave a talk, titled “You Are Enough,” to young adults, drawing on lessons I learned in Kenya that reminded me of the power of faith, dignity, and confidence – lessons that inspired me to reengage more deeply in ministry in my home Diocese of Phoenix.

Ms. Kaiti-Lynn Beazley, a theology teacher at Xavier College Prep in Phoenix, has offered me the opportunity to talk to Xavier students about my experience with the Engage Your Equal program in Kenya. I am presenting at their day-long retreat on Saturday, January 31^st, 2026, with another member of my E.Y.E. cohort, Daphne Vera Munoz. We will be sharing stories from Kenya to 50 sophomores and encouraging these students to consider what saying “yes” to God does in our lives. Daphne and I have planned to base our presentation on what saying “yes” to the Lord did for us and how our “yes” to E.Y.E. has forever changed our lives.

I have been blessed with the opportunity to bring back everything I learned and experienced during the E.Y.E. trip and share it with our Diocese of Phoenix, especially through my primary ministry, Palabras de Amor. As a community rooted in Catholic teaching and dedicated to human development, Palabras de Amor has given me space to share my experiences from Kenya and to inspire others to deepen their understanding of the universal Church, mental health, and the unique needs of our young adults. I have also been collaborating with the campus ministry team at Xavier College Preparatory, where I will be speaking in January for their sophomore retreat.

Overall, I am incredibly grateful for this experience, one that has been grounded in faith and has opened countless doors in both my personal and spiritual life. I look forward to continuing to share what I have learned, spreading the light of this journey throughout our Diocese.

The Engage Your Equal program has been life-changing, not only for myself, but also for my teens at the St. Charles Borromeo Youth Group. When I returned from Kenya, I jumped straight into Vacation Bible School training and taught the teens chants we had learned in Kenya. I had a new focus for the ministry, inspired by the community life I witnessed in Kenya: to build community and serve others.

I began holding public bible studies after Sunday Mass at coffee shops and restaurants with the teens. We went on our first Hope Retreat where teens learned how to help young women struggling with abortion, and we started writing Hope letters for our Glimpses of Heaven events. The teens are eager to serve those at Andre House and fill their Hope bags with goodies for the homeless population, and we want to extend the community we’ve formed through these activities and other events to neighboring parishes. Through the E.Y.E. program, my teens and I have received a new lens in which we view ministry as our community, not just a mandatory activity. The E.Y.E. program changed lives, not only in Kenya but also through the examples we brought back home to Phoenix.