The QuEST Committee and University Friends Meeting are happy to announce that Promise Welkin Partner will be joining us as QuEST’s Director in May.  Promise comes to us from Oregon, where she has been active in the Eugene Friends Meeting. A Christian Quaker, she is part of the 2016 cohort of the Way of the Spirit: Contemplative Study in Community, a convergent Friends spiritual formation program. For the last 10 years, she has worked in independent schools including Olney Friends School as an English teacher, advisor, dorm parent, and administrator.  Promise is excited to join QuEST as its 6th Director, to mentor and learn from the amazing young adults we host each year, and to develop spiritual programming and provide spiritual nurture. 

In addition to her professional work advising high school students, Promise will draw on her personal experiences as she supports the Fellows in community life and on the job. As a student at Bryn Mawr College, she lived with twelve other women in a vegan and activist co-op that operated on a consensus model. She first started attending Meeting during college, and she sees Friends as a religious tradition whose beliefs and practices meet young people where they are. Promise also knows the experience of a year of service as she served as an AmeriCorps VISTA after college, working with youth in Burlington, Vermont. (Fun fact: She applied to be a QuEST Fellow first!)

Promise loves to dance, she plays Ultimate Frisbee, and she draws solace and inspiration from contemporary free verse poetry (William Stafford is a go-to). Promise has been active in the Eugene chapter of SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) and hopes to continue her education and activism for racial justice when she moves. Her husband Avery Partner Welkin grew up in Olympia. His grandparents are Jack and Judy Brown, who were active in the University Friends Meeting for over 30 years before helping to form Agate Passage Friends Meeting. Promise and Avery will move to Seattle in early May, and Avery is looking for work, too. He is an experienced arborist and landscaper and a certified secondary social studies, language arts, and ESL teacher. Please pass on any leads to current QuEST Director Alisa Bieber at director@quest-seattle.org.