WELCOME LAUP ALUMNI
You are the fulfillment of LAUP's mission.

If you are one of our LAUP alumni, we want to remind you that you are the most significant fruit LAUP has to offer the world.  You have been a part of a unique history of God's compassion and justice in InterVarsity and in Los Angeles.

Our hope is to encourage you as an agent of God's justice, power, and compassion in the world, and to give you the chance to continue to be a part of a movement of God.

You are our most valuable resource in leading the next generation!  Testimonies, teaching, and mentoring from LAUP alumni have consistently been some of the most helpful influences upon LAUP interns.  Whether your career is in law, education, politics, business, high tech, or a stay at home parent, if you feel like you have some wisdom and hope to offer the next generation, we want to know!

ALUMNI TESTIMONIES

Nathaly Moreno, Pomona College
​When I think about all that I’ve learned, the way I think, the way I perceive the world, the way I connect to God, or the way I relate to other people, I can honestly say that, in terms of all of these things, that there is a pre-LAUP Nathaly and a post-LAUP Nathaly.  For years, I struggled with low self worth and my identity as a child of God and all the messages from the world reinforced this.  (The fact that I now regularly refer to the truth of the Kingdom of God and the lies of the Kingdom of  the World is also a sign that I’m a product of LAUP).  I could never be pretty, smart, or talented enough.  I doubted that God cared enough to actually communicate with me and I wondered where He was in the midst of all my struggles.  Of course, there were times where I felt this more acutely more than other times, but there was always this underlying sense of doubt in God’s ability to break through and completely heal me from this negativity. 

Now, this wouldn’t  be a good testimony if it stayed in this depressing tone.  The good news is that God rescued me from all of these things and has truly set me on high.  Even when I find myself sinking into negativity again (it’s hard habit to break), I now have the tools to recognize and dismiss them as lies.  I no longer feel enslaved by them.  LAUP is where God taught me about who I am in Him and gave me the tools to protect and defend myself from anything that tries to get me to believe anything contrary to God’s truth.  He transformed me by deepening my relationship with Him and allowing me to experience His amazing power. God used the amazing speakers at LAUP to show me more about His character,  that He is a God that came to live incarnationally among us and that I should do the same.  These talks gave me the foundation for the way I want to live the rest of my life.  

The best thing about LAUP is that I had the immediate opportunity to put the teachings I heard on Thursday nights into practice at my LAUP site.  I learned about servanthood from Mary Poplin and Mother Teresa, Spiritual Warfare from Dennis Ortega, Racial Reconcilation from Scott Hall, and I could go on forever.  I can honestly say that with every talk, I can name an instance where I put the principles I learned into practice at my LAUP site.  This is where I learned that it truly pays off to step out in faith.

I am so grateful for LAUP and I am overjoyed at the thought that SO many people have had the chance or will have the chance to transformed as I was."

​Keefe Piper, Evergreen State College
While I grew up mostly going to a Presbyterian church, I have some Catholic heritage.  My mom comes from a strong Catholic family, I went to a Jesuit high school, and my family even went to a Catholic church in my early childhood.  But by the time I got to college, I had walked away from faith altogether.

In college, I rediscovered Jesus in InterVaristy, a non-denominational, predominantly Protestant community.  The trajectory of my life was forever changed, and when I graduated from college I decided to go on staff with InterVarsity.  In the past couple of years the Holy Spirit has been nudging me back to the Catholic Church.  Initially, I didn’t know what this would mean for my work with InterVarsity.  Would the Catholic Church tolerate me working for a Protestant ministry?  Would InterVarsity deem me unqualified to lead?  

This summer I brought a team of students from Evergreen to the Los Angeles Urban Project (LAUP).  On one of the first nights of LAUP the team leaders were praying in preparation for the summer.  As another leader was praying for me she said, “Keefe, I don’t know if you have any Catholic background, but God is showing me an image of priestly robes, and I am hearing the word ‘Father.’  I also have the sense that God will answer some questions that you have been asking for a long time.”  This startled me.  I immediately thought, ‘Oh no, she is prophesying that God will call me to be a priest!’  As much as it startled me, it reassured me.  Not only did I not need to hide my Catholic faith in this new community, God was telling me that L.A. was a place for me to explore it and cultivate it.    

I was encouraged to find that significant aspects of LAUP’s content drew from two of the deepest wells in the Catholic tradition: contemplation and social justice.  One of the hallmarks of the LAUP schedule was the weekly Sabbath, on which we rested from work, went to church, and kept two hours of solitude.  To guide our times of solitude, we read Henri Nouwen’s book, Out of Solitude.  We learned that in solitude we are filled with the compassion and truth the world needs.  Without solitude, we tend to merely recycle the world’s garbage back to it.  We extended this weekly practice of solitude at the conclusion of LAUP when all the team leaders spent three refreshing days at Serra Retreat, the Franciscan retreat center in Malibu.  

LAUP presented several Catholics as models of social justice in response to God’s love for the poor.  One day we listened to a university professor describe her experience staying with Mother Theresa and the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta.  We followed her talk with a documentary on Mother Theresa.  We were struck by the complete self-giving of the Sisters.  We were also struck by their thoroughly spiritual perspective on their work.  “This is not social work,” Mother Theresa said, “This is religious work.”  They met Jesus on the altar of the communion table in the morning, and met him in the faces of the dying on the streets.  We read about the power of this same religious compassion playing out in a context closer to home in Fr. Greg Boyle’s book, Tattoos on the Heart.  In Boyle’s ministry to inter-city L.A., he makes room in his heart for gangsters and murderers, recognizing that there is nothing in them that is not also in him and that we are all brothers and sisters in desperate need of God’s grace.  In the process, he sees numerous gangsters become children of God.  

At LAUP, I saw evidence of God unifying his children.  He was disposing of the barriers and building bridges of mutual respect and love, not only between Catholic and Protestant, but also between ethnic minorities and ethnic majorities, and between rich and poor."

​Taylor Rapson, UCLA
One of the most significant memories I have had at LAUP was early on in our trip.  I was super convicted one day that I had been wasting my time at UCLA.  I was sitting in drama with the older students at the Harambee Center (3rd through 6th graders) and was just thinking and day-dreaming when all of a sudden God slapped me across the face with the reality that I needed a new mindset.  I had let my pride and fear of failure lead me to a state of laziness.

Being a pre-med student, I knew the classes were hard (and that failure was an actual possibility) and so I came to the conclusion that failing while trying was worse than failing by not trying and I wanted to suffer the least amount possible.  I didn’t want to work really hard toward something and then fail, so I figured if I failed by not trying then there was no way I could feel bad about it because I didn’t try.  By doing that, I slowly let my aspirations of being a doctor go, and I adopted a very lazy attitude toward my school work.

While I was looking around at the kids in the room, all of a sudden I was overcome with sadness for the kids and sadness for me.  I saw the ways the school system limited them and prevented them from truly succeeding (most of them kids are two grade levels behind and are just getting passed through the system) and I saw the ways I hadn’t been utilizing the resources I had access to at UCLA and was taking for granted what a blessing it truly was.

In that moment, God convicted me to swallow my pride and work through my fear of failure.  He convicted me that he has kept me from failing my science classes for a a reason and that  should pursue medicine again.  I want to help those that have been less fortunate than I have been and to provide healthcare to those who can’t afford it, or maybe even to those who don’t even have basic necessities of life, like clean water.

Since then it has been an amazing journey of God reaffirming this conviction and giving me a better sense of what and where he wants my ministry to be within that.  This experience was the starting point for a journey of God teaching me to let go of fear and self-doubt.  I’ve been learning to live in faith."

TESTIFY AND TELL YOUR STORY

Build the movement by testifying and telling your story.

Whether it's a story of how LAUP played a role in shaping your life in the past, or how you're continuing to live out the values of LAUP in your life today, we'd love to hear it and we think others will, too.  Our hope is to nurture an ongoing dialogue about God's heart for the poor and how we can creatively gain that heart and bring it to our world.

To testify and tell your story go to the Los Angeles Urban Project Alumni Facebook page, and post it for others to read, respond, and be encouraged.