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Campus interns start work at K.U., K-State

By Melodie Woerman
Editor, The Harvest

Two recent college graduates already are hard at work as diocesan campus interns for the 2009-2010 academic year.

Cortney Dale is living at St. Francis Canterbury House at Kansas State University in Manhattan, and Joel McAlister is in residence at St. Anselm Canterbury House at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

The two will work with campus missioners the Revs. Craig Loya and Susan Terry, assisting with a variety of campus ministry programs across the diocese.

Dale is a 2008 graduate of Bellarmine University of Louisville, Ky. For the past year she worked in South Africa as a member of the Young Adult Service Corps, an overseas mission program sponsored by the Episcopal Church that matches young adults with ministry needs across the Anglican Communion.

While in South Africa she assisted with an after-school program operated by an Order of the Holy Cross Anglican monastery in Grahamstown.

In 2007 Dale was an intern in the Communications Office of the Diocese of Kentucky.

Joel McAlister just graduated from the University of Arizona in Tempe but spent part of the spring semester and summer in Arequipa, Peru, where he assisted with two Episcopal Church-related orphanages.

He previously had spent time in Arequipa as an intern with the South American Missionary Society, an Anglican missionary outreach organization.

He also spent the spring semester 2007 and two months in 2008 studying in Queretaro, Mexico. McAlister is fluent in Spanish.

Both interns will serve as mentors to the undergraduate peer ministers living in each Canterbury house and will help oversee their work. They also will work with peer ministers working on other campuses across the diocese.

They will help organize events specifically for students on the campuses where they will work and will help create service projects for peer ministers and other students on campus.

Dale and McAlister together will organize a national mission trip for college students during the coming year.

This is the third year the Diocese of Kansas has hired graduate campus interns. They are paid a modest stipend for the year and are provided housing at one of the Canterbury houses.