JPIC Commission

We are pleased to announce the inaugural JPIC Commission for the United States -- Canada Province of the Society of the Sacred Heart. The Commission has been charged with the work of coordinating an integrative approach to education, information, and advocacy on matters of Justice, Peace, and Integrity of Creation in all areas across the Province, and developing a number of JPIC Learning Hubs to develop and promote opportunities for broad-based engagement in this work.

Read below to get to know the eight new members of the JPIC Commission, made up of a cross-section of constituencies from across the Sacred Heart family. 

(To contact the JPIC Commission, email jpic@stuartcenter.org.) 

Headshot of Lauren Brownlee

Lauren Brownlee is a member of the DC Associates group and former Director of Social Action at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart. Professionally, she serves as Associate General Secretary for Community and Culture at the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL). In this role, she offers strategic support to FCNL’s young adult program, Quaker outreach, human resources, and Friends Place on Capitol Hill. She helps to steward FCNL’s shared anti-racism, anti-bias, justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments.

 

Headshot of Amanda Codina

Amanda Codina is the Director of Student Programs and Special Initiatives for the Network of Sacred Heart Schools. Prior to joining this office, she was Dean of Students at Convent of the Sacred in NYC. She is a graduate of Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart in Miami, FL, where she also worked after college. Amanda has experienced the charism of the Society in varying ways and uses these experiences to guide her work, particularly in relation to JPIC.

 

Headshot of Kristi Laughlin

Kristi Laughlin has been a community organizer for twenty five years in the Bay Area, advancing in programs and policies to uplift low-wage working families. She loves her role as Senior Campaign Director at the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), where she can act on her core belief that the economy should serve working people, and not the other way around. She currently leads EBASE’s housing justice work and supports low-income immigrant tenants to organize for safe and affordable homes to raise their families with dignity. Kristi has her masters from the Graduate Theological Union and has been an RSCJ Associate for over twenty years. She lives in a small co-housing community in Oakland with her husband and son.

 

Headshot of Marilyn Lorenz

Marilyn Lorenz, MA, MDiv, is an RSCJ Associate, native of St Louis, and a music and theology educator. After working for a year in Chile, she co-founded the St Louis Inter-Faith Committee on Latin America and continues to volunteer with that organization. As an activist she has worked on numerous social justice, human rights and peace campaigns including black lives matter, immigrant rights and farm worker justice. She led immersion experiences for high school students in Central America for 25 years. Through the decades she has learned that the work is one of accompaniment, putting a human face on the issues, and advocating with peoples in struggle. She is married with two daughters and three grandchildren.

 

Headshot of Jenny Morfin

Jennifer Morfín is the Director of Educational Initiatives and Leadership in the Stuart Center for Mission. Having grown up in Mexico City, and now currently living in the US with her two teenagers, Jenny brings an intercultural leadership mindset to every work+life endeavor. She is a passionate and energetic bi-lingual process facilitator and learning development specialist with more than 22 years of experience in cross-cultural team building, strategic planning, human resources, organizational change, neuro linguistic programming coaching, cultivating compassion, mindfulness, and meditation practice.

 

Headshot of Cecile Meijer

Cecile Meijer, RSCJ: The powerless and voiceless have always tugged at Cecile Meijer’s heart, but it was her service as the Society’s NGO Representative at the United Nations that brought her to the systemic level in a new way.  Working in a transnational context meant needing to understand domestic realities of injustice around the world while bringing the voiceless and the invisible to the global negotiating table.  For Cecile it was like learning how to let the local and the global dance together. 

 

Headshot of Diane Roche RSCJ

Diane Roche RSCJ is originally from Boston, Massachusetts. She has spent the better part of four decades living and working in poor, urban neighborhoods in the United States and Haiti. Her training and deepest interest is in the field of affordable housing, having served as a property manager in Boston, St. Louis and Washington, D.C. She has also served as executive director for several nonprofit community development agencies and served the Society as director of ministry for the US Province, JPIC Director for the USC Province and as a member of the Provincial Team. She has served on the boards of Villa Duchesne and Oak Hill School in St. Louis and the Regis School of the Sacred Heart in Houston and Princeton Academy of the Sacred Heart in Princeton.    She earned a bachelor’s in English from Emmanuel College in Boston and a master’s in urban affairs from Boston University.  

 

Headshot of Megan Wilson-Reitz

Megan Wilson-Reitz serves in the Stuart Center for Mission as the Justice, Peace, and Integrity of Creation Coordinator for the United States/Canada Province of the Society of the Sacred Heart. In this role, Megan coordinates the work of the JPIC Commission. Megan's academic and advocacy work focuses on the intersections of faith, ethics, economics, community, and justice, especially where these are affected by systemic oppression and injustice. Megan also serves as lecturer in the Theology and Religious Studies Department at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where she lives with her husband and two children. 

 

 

Below: The Provincial Team's letter announcing the composition and charge of the JPIC Commission, February 10, 2023.