.jpg)
Laurel McCormack came to New Haven in 2012 straight from Mercer College for an internship at Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS). She’s been there ever since, working as a youth support specialist, a case management coordinator, and a volunteer coordinator. She also launched the cultural companions program, which pairs immigrants with American families. Along the way she’s undergone a baptism by fire, learning organizational and administrative skills on the job. She wanted to learn more, so in 2019 she entered the joint program at YDS and UConn for degrees in divinity and social work. She graduated in May.
“I was already doing social work-oriented jobs, but I had not had a lot of training,” she says. “I wasn’t sure that what I was doing was aligned with a wider set of practices that are time-tested.”
Before coming to New Haven, she’d considered going to divinity school. She grew up in the Atlanta suburbs, where her family participated in congregations ranging from nondenominational megachurches to house churches. “My parents fostered a sense of divine presence and love, but I’ve always had a lot of questions,” Laurel says. “I felt a mismatch between a Christianity that focused on inner moral life but didn’t have a lot to say about social injustices.” At Mercer, she found a like-minded community in the Glad River Congregation. “In the Sixties, at a time when the churches in Macon were racially segregated, they had formed a church where when anybody who wanted to worship could come together.”
After college, she signed up with the Episcopal Service Corps to work at IRIS. “Service Corps felt like a time to bring those things together—exploring religious practice and faith.”
She started her studies at Yale and UConn when the Trump administration was implementing anti-immigrant policies. “IRIS had to dismantle so much of what had been built up over the years,” she says. “There were so many stories of community deportations and so much anguish with people waiting for their families to come.”
Laurel plans to continue her training with clinical practices and become an LCSW. And she wants to continue working with families as she does at IRIS. “I would like to be somewhere where I can do the creative program building that IRIS let me do over the years.”
—John Curtis