January 12, 2009
Associate Director of Paulist Young Adult Ministries
Development coordinator Brittany Janis and project manager Jarrad Venegas are the two newest staffers at Busted Halo®, the Paulist outreach to young adult Catholics. Both joined us this past summer and their contributions have had immediate results.
Brittany recently put on our first Busted Halo® Showcase, an evening at the Sirius-XM Radio headquarters that introduced new people to our ministry and solicited their financial support. Meanwhile, Jarrad has been instrumental in producing features for the new Googling God church teaching resource section at BustedHalo.com®.
Ms. Janis comes, 23, to Busted Halo® from Cleveland after working on a state senate political campaign.
“I also worked for a few different non-profits in Cleveland in development and was asked by an agency if I’d be interested in working for a Catholic organization and I said ‘Yeah! That’d be great!’” said Ms. Janis.
A graduate of Case Western, Brittany’s background in theatre has also helped her contribute as the co-host of the Busted Halo® Podcast.
“The fact that Busted Halo is very media-savvy and there are opportunities for both development work and for things I worked on in college is exciting,” she said.
Ms. Janis likens her role to St. Paul, who started the early expansion and local support of the Christian message.
“Because we’re such a small operation in terms of staff, you wind up getting the chance to do everything – which is very cool – but at times it can also be overwhelming,” she said. “Because we’re not a parish or campus ministry, finding people who would be interested in supporting our mission and being part of something new is a great challenge for us and for the church today.”
Mr. Venegas, a 31-year-old Houston native, talks about “eating a lot of barbeque and burgers growing up,” before marrying his wife, Linda, becoming a vegetarian and moving to New York.
“When I was looking for a job, I got an email from a headhunter that directed me to BustedHalo.com®,” he said. “So I checked it out and was blown away by how cool it was and how it was something that I just did not expect.”
As the project manager, Mr. Venegas sees himself as the one who has organizational skills to mange many different projects that are going on daily.
“Each day there are about 6 things that demand my full attention,” he noted. But he loves the more complicated projects such as the evolution video and the All Saints/Halloween video in the Googling God section, for example.
“It’s just great to produce something that’s so creative and so fun and so important to a lot of people,” said Mr. Venegas. “I never thought I’d be able to do something like that.” Again, like our patron, St. Paul, Jarrad helps gets the Good News out to the whole world in a language young people can easily understand.
Jarrad and Linda are are liking their new adopted city, getting inside the culture by visiting museums, restaurants and other neighborhoods.
“Linda does most of the research and finds great places to explore,” he said. “For us it came down to a choice between New York and Buenos Aires, where we had spent some time and just thought it was beautiful. But the lure of New York City was too strong, so we said ‘Let’s do this.’ So here we are.”