With the help of garlic (yes, garlic!), we’ll explore important lessons around long growing seasons and putting down roots. As we ward off the vampires, we’ll also create good protective boundaries that keep us safe and give us courage. 

Click HERE for the Order of Service.

You can watch a recording of the service on YouTube HERE. 

Zoë Johnston is USG’s Director of Spiritual Development. She is a lifelong Unitarian Universalist and grew up along the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. She was raised in the First Universalist Church of Denver, but found her first spiritual community in the gatherings of UU youth across the Pacific Western Region. This fostered a love of emergent covenants, collaboratively made worship services, and sustainable youth leadership. 

She moved to Philadelphia to attend Arcadia University for both her undergraduate and graduate degrees. In May of 2024, she received her Masters of Arts in International Peace and Conflict Resolution. Her graduate thesis discussed how conflict transformation principles can be implemented with an abolitionist lens in social justice movement spaces. While she was a student, she also worked for the UU Ministry for Earth as their young adult Network Coordinator. In that role, she focused on bridging political education with spiritual groundedness and worked to establish a community of solidarity among UU young adults. 

She now lives in West Philly and tends to the small garden in the backyard of her rowhouse. Her life is full of stacks of books waiting to be read, an absurd amount of loose leaf tea, reality TV competition shows, and potluck dinners with friends.