Jennie DeMizio

Jennie DeMizio

Hi, my name is Jennie DeMizio, my family has been coming to Beacon for 17 years, and 3 minutes is NOT enough time to talk about the immeasurable impact our involvement with Beacon has had on our lives. 

From the very beginning, my children Stella and Sam and I immediately fell into the embrace of new friends in the Pre-K room, welcoming Beacon staff, and also a nurturing routine that helped to shape our week and provide guidance for me as a parent. I had not grown up with a spiritual community, but really wanted that for my kids. Beacon not only gave all three of us a spiritual framework for our daily lives that included practices of gratitude, helping others, and widening our understanding and embrace of the world around us, but it also gave us access to a range of experiences I could never have come up with on my own. 

There were beautiful rituals like hanging of the greens, water, flower and bread communions, the Passover seder, block parties, and of course, weekly religious education which all became calendar events that grounded us in the Beacon community. Beacon gave us milestone celebrations like 5th Grade Rite of Passage and Coming of Age, which invited Stella and Sam to think about their values in ways that just doesn’t “happen” in life outside of a spiritual home like Beacon. And their adult mentors,  who weren’t their parents or their school teachers or their sports coaches, showed them acceptance and patience, and encouraged them to be their authentic selves. Again, these are the most valuable gifts that don’t just find their way to your children - you have to put your kids in a community like Beacon to make that happen.

Through Beacon, we visited a mosque, and a Buddhist temple, and a Sikh gurdwara. And I will never forget watching Sam walk up a Catskill mountain with a couple of novice Buddhist monks who described what it was like to take an extended vow of silence. These experiences don’t just happen, outside of communities like Beacon!

With our Beacon Community we took on the world - we wrote letters for marriage equality, we marched in the People’s Climate March and for Black Lives Matter - and we felt the impact of our Beacon community action as our voices were answered, on the national level. We hosted youth from our partner church in Transylvania twice, and sent Stella with a Beacon group over to Transylvania for a reciprocal trip. These experiences just don’t happen.