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Meet Jacey Massetto

Jacey Massetto hails from Santa Clarita, a city north of Los Angeles best known for being home to Six Flags Magic Mountain, but she didn’t frequent it as a child--too hot, in an already-toasty part of the country. Her family life revolved around education--her mom taught math at the school Jacey attended, and that love of learning took her to college in Georgia and, eventually, back California--only this time, she ended up in San Francisco. Jacey is City Hope’s new program associate, and we want you to get to know her!

I went to a school that used a Classical education curriculum. We did a lot of looking back at classical history and literature. I actually learned Latin as a language, too. It was there that I learned about a school in Georgia called Covenant College. I told one of my teachers that I was interested in missions work but didn’t want to be a missionary. That left me a very narrow window, and this teacher told me about community development and Covenant College. At first, I didn’t think it was for me. No one around where I lived had ever heard of Covenant, a small school in northern Georgia near the Tennessee border.

I went to Covenant for college. I majored in Community Development, and added economics to my major. I love math, and there is surprisingly a good bit of overlap between economics and community development. Double-majoring helped me get more of the underlying systems that play into community development. I took a United States Urban Poverty class that I loved. That gave me both economics and community development in one class. I also took a class on women and holistic missions, which was super interesting.

The thing I love most about community development work is the relational component of it. It’s great to see how we can use empathy and compassion while we also work on tangible goals and work with larger systemic issues. The interplay between those things drew me in.

City Hope was where I had an internship in 2017. I was here for three months, living in the City Hope house and interning at City Hope, so I was fully immersed in it. I loved City Hope and what they were doing, and knew I wanted to come back.

I’m now program associate. I’m in charge of coordinating the events we already have in place--making sure we have the food we need, have the facilities set up, that the calendar is set up. In the future, I’ll be part of helping grow and develop our programs.

With Community Development, it’s a ton of theory, and our classes were telling us that it’s all going to look different when you’re out in the real world. I think it’s super cool to have the foundation and getting to see this in action and make it our own. I just think City Hope is totally in line with good ministry, so helping that grow in the future is really exciting. I get to practically live out things that I am passionate about and was passionate about learning.

For people who are interested in learning more about City Hope, I would say that the most important thing is just being willing to try. Hopefully on our end we are making it easy for everyone, not just the guests but also the volunteers. Everyone has specific gifts that they can use, so it’s finding the things you know you can do really well, and just trying it and being okay if it fails. There’s no set right or wrong answers to things - that’s a big part of this work in general. You just have to be willing to learn.

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