Brittany Kotelis:
We started, and we mostly right now work with communities of Catholic sisters. In the United States, the average age of a Catholic sister is 82 years old. And so a lot of communities are going through a process of becoming smaller, and because of that, making decisions about properties, buildings, schools, offices, convents, mother houses, retreat centers like this one that have grown too big for them. This is happening across the country — is a big transition of lands that have been held by religious communities, being in transition in those communities, trying to figure out, 'What do we do with this?' What we saw when we started three-and-a-half years ago is that, many times Catholic sisters are doing incredible justice-centered work. You know, the first time I got arrested for a protest was with Catholic sisters talking about family separation. These are women who are committed to racial equity, to climate justice, to migrant justice, and have been for a long time. But oftentimes the decisions that they're making about their land and assets are sort of trapped in this bureaucratic administrative burden zone. And so we come in to say, 'How can we bring these worlds together, so that the way that you are transitioning, the way that you're letting go, is actually fueling the movements that you care about and the future of those movements?'