We center the needs of local social service partners and churches by letting their voices drive our decisions. We don’t assume we know what’s best, but rather, enter into partnerships with a spirit of humility and trust.
We make space for a diversity of voices, backgrounds, and beliefs and seek to bring our faith proximate to immediate local needs. It is in that intersection where we can wrestle with being uncomfortably informed and mature in our faith.
The more we connect, the more we can creatively problem-solve through cultivated relationships and shared resources.
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Project Peace East Bay has been active in Berkeley and Oakland since 2006, and was officially incorporated as a 501(c)3 California nonprofit in December 2007.
Jen McKillips is the Director of Partnerships and Board Member of Project Peace East Bay. She has over 20 years of experience as a community organizer and non-profit leader playing key roles in growing and managing organizations. Jen is an expert in mobilizing the faith community to serve and deeply engage in their communities, and is a thought leader on pressing issues facing the East Bay including education systems and eliminating structural inequity. Jen and her husband, Brian, have 3 children and have lived in Oakland since 2006.
Sarah Park is the Director of Communications, capturing the stories of the Project Peace community and creating ways to walk alongside volunteers and churches in their journey of integrating their faith with justice work. Sarah is also a freelance writer & editor, focusing on cultivating cross-racial conversation about theology and identity politics playing out in the church and society at large. She currently lives in the South Bay and attends the River Community Church.
Linda is the Director of Operations and has over 15 years of experience in strategic planning, operations, and marketing. Her passion is to design systems and execute strategies for growth, using her learnings from investment banking and tech industries to make a social impact - starting here, locally in the East Bay. She supports financial literacy, access to higher education, and issues impacting older adults. Linda lives with her husband in Oakland and attends Christian Layman Church, where she serves on the worship team.
Introduced to Project Peace by Mary Ellen Azada, Preston Leung is a Master of Divinity student and member of the Biblical Justice Cohort at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is a San Francisco native and aspiring pastor with a heart to see the Bay Area community not only grow in their spiritual formation, but be mobilized to practice justice as integral to it. Before coming to Fuller, he obtained a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering at UC Davis and served on staff with a campus ministry, pioneering its outreach and prayer ministries. Preston is eager to work and learn alongside Project Peace as an intern, furthering his call to be a pastor with an edge toward activating others in their call towards service and justice.
Jen Roth is the Partnership Formation Lead for Contra Costa County. Her passion is cultivating relationships that bridge the church and the broader community toward serving vulnerable communities. Jen grew up in Pt. Richmond and Oakland, began her own family in New York City and returned to the Bay Area, settling in Lafayette nearly 15 years ago. Experiencing life in diverse communities fostered her passion for working with the underserved and raising awareness of social inequalities. Jen and her husband, Dave, have 4 children and attend Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church.
Calvin Ho served as a pastor at First Covenant Church of Oakland from 2011 - 2018. During his tenure at FCC, he championed volunteer service and a tighter partnership with its neighborhood public schools and pioneered an ESL program for immigrants. He also served as a member on the OUSD Quality School Development Policy Administrative Regulations committee in 2015 to advocate for the students in Oakland.
Calvin and his wife cofounded Compassion Pet Hospice in 2016 to support pets and pets parents through the most difficult journey in life. He is currently developing a new communication platform at his startup Restvo that aims to empower non-profits and faith communities by creating deeper and more meaningful relationships among its members and volunteers. Calvin is married to Tiffany and has two young children.
Deana was born and raised in the beautiful country of Brazil, where her parents served as missionaries. A year after attending Liberty University in Virginia, she moved to Danville to work at Community Presbyterian Church, Danville in October 2003. She's a fairly adventurous person who loves to travel, and can't live without: coffee, her camera, sunshine, world cup soccer, and Reese's peanut butter cups.
Joel Kim was born and raised in Los Angeles. He came to the East Bay for college in 2005 and has developed a deep appreciation for the vibrancy and history of the region. After three harsh winters in Chicago for law school, he came back to the beauty and warmth of the East Bay in 2016. He currently works as a lawyer for the California Department of Social Services, protecting the safety of clients in community care facilities throughout the state.
Wayne Clarke is the executive director of Oakland Impact Center. Its mission is to engage, educate, empower, and transform underprivileged and under-resourced communities one family at a time with the goal of self-sufficiency.
Before launching Oakland Impact Center, Wayne spent five years as a community activist, organizer, mentor, and well-traveled empowerment speaker in working with youth, young adults, and men around the message of life transformation. Wayne’s passion for this work comes from growing up in West Oakland and experiencing so much violence, devastation, hopelessness, loss of life, and pain while not seeing enough love, unity, peace, growth, and healing in his community. He now lives by a quote that he has coined: “I’m just trying to be what I didn’t see.”
Wayne also enjoys sports, exploring nature, traveling, and being a single father to his four children.
Angela Aguilar is the Executive Director of Cityteam Oakland, supporting addicted, homeless, and low-income families to recover their lives one day at a time. She consider it a coming home to where her story began as she herself is a proud graduate of Cityteam’s Women’s Program and is privileged to serve the community from which she came from in Oakland.
Amy moved to the Bay Area from Washington, DC in 2005 with her husband, Alex, who attended UC Berkeley's MBA program. Having lived east of the Mississippi River all of her life except a stint in London, Amy is grateful to now call the Bay Area home with her husband and two children, Celia and William. A fundraiser for over a decade, she now enjoys building infrastructure for non-profit organizations and doing what she can to engage with the community in Oakland, especially through Project Peace as its board president.
Bart Garrett is one of the founders of Project Peace, co-planted Christ Church in Berkeley and Oakland, and now pastors Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church while directing City-to-City Bay Area.
Ben is a native of San Francisco and a longtime activist for peace and justice in the Bay Area. As an advocate for youth, he served as a member of the crisis counseling team for West Contra Costa Unified School District and as Program Director for Global Education Partnership, empowering at-risk youth through entrepreneurship. Ben has a history of spiritual leadership beginning as a youth pastor and continuing through his years as collegiate pastor for Greater St. Paul Baptist Church and Shiloh Church. He served as Executive Director of Cityteam, a Christian non-profit providing rescue, recovery, medical, financial and educational opportunities to hurting and homeless people in Oakland for 7 years. Ben founded Empower Initiative in 2014 to provide faith-based, technical assistance around public safety issues affecting the urban core. He is beginning a new journey as Director or Clergy Development with PICO California in June, 2015. Ben has received many honors including the FRED Scholars Award, ONGB Non-Profit Leader of the Year, and the Oakland Police Foundation's Neighborhood Champion Award. Ben & his wife Gynelle have been married for 15 years and have 3 beautiful daughters. They reside in Oakland.
Elba Morales was born and raised in the Bay Area, and is the Director of Development for Centro Legal de la Raza, a legal advocacy non-profit organization that serves immigrants, workers, and tenants.
An Oakland native, she is passionate about the intersections of social and racial justice, religion, feminism, and the flourishing of the LGBTQ community in both social and religious spheres. She is on the advisory board for ALDES (a volunteer-led organization that advocates for LGBTQ rights in El Salvador), and for Radically Fit, a body positive inclusive for-profit gym in Oakland.
She holds a bachelor's degree from Patten University in Oakland and a master's degree in Systematic and Philosophical Theology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
Elba lives in Oakland with her dog and several succulents. She enjoys dancing, weightlifting, and stand up comedy.
