Rev. Joan Alevras: Current Student

TRANSCRIPT:

I'm an ordained interfaith minister and I'm an active Unitarian, so I have a very liberal background, very broad. [I] have studied many religions and learned the value of humans searching for meaning in, in the middle of the world. And what I've been doing for the past -- this is my third year -- is I'm the Supervisor of Clinical Pastoral Education at one of the large hospitals in New Jersey. It's actually been rated in, for the past at least half a dozen years, one of the top 100 companies to work for in the United States. So -- and that's rated by the people who work there, and so, the quality of the atmosphere of the company is one that is very supportive and they've had, they've wanted to have, a Clinical Pastoral Education program for a number of years, and I met the manager of pastoral care and so started that, so at any given time now we have anywhere from 12 to 16 chaplains working part-time in a 525-bed hospital. So it's added great value, and the request we have is that someone have a theological background; they don't have to be ordained, but we want people to have some, some values of organized (or less organized) religion that informs their work about people searching for meaning. Because in the hospital, as you know, there are people coming in most often with dire needs: an emergency or a trauma or an urgent situation to take care of.