The Ergon Professional Hub is a group of people who help each other to grow in the different types of work they do, educate each other in different skills, share professional resources, and help each other to find jobs. It was proposed at the start of the pandemic as a response to the growing job crisis.

Last spring, several members of the Ergon Professional Hub and Fr. José Medina met together to share their experience of helping one another in their work and during the pandemic. At this recent meeting, the theme was to discover how the experience in Ergon helps us to live the daily work each person is called to.

One of the key relationships within the Ergon Professional Hub is between mentors and mentees. Often in the conversation there was the discovery that, as a charitable work, Ergon helps us to approach work differently, both as a mentor and mentee. It’s a place where School of Community goes from being an idea to a concrete place to discover that Christian life is given. It’s a place to discover what it means to receive someone in a weak moment of their life and to discover reason opening up.

As several members pointed out, often we go into a meeting or approach members of our family fully prepared, with a particular proposal. Sometimes, there is a certain eagerness to impose an idea. But, after having lived the work in Ergon, mentors and mentees have discovered in themselves an openness to other possibilities. They experience their reason opening up.

One graphic designer who was searching for a job at the same time as his spouse was facing health challenges discovered the freedom to focus on his wife after a conversation with his mentor. Alone, he would not have made the same judgment.

Another mentee shared the vulnerability and humility of being unemployed. Yet, at the same, she has discovered that the experience of being unemployed can become the possibility of all the questions of life opening up and coming to surface.

A mentor found herself in a position where her manager changed and discovered that all of the things she was saying to her mentees were now something she lived concretely in her work. And another mentor shared how she had just retired and wasn’t sure how to use her skills in retirement, but was given the guidance that the problem is not finding the best use of a skill set but rather discovering what is needed. In time, the best use of the problem of where to apply a skill set resolves itself.

One of the final witnesses of the meeting was from a mentor who was paired with a mentee who was a friend he had known in the past. In addition to the joy of sharing conversations again, he discovered Christ present when his friend’s need was gratuitously met by an opportunity that presented itself through his networks. It was a moment of recognizing the preference of God.

Interwoven in the various witnesses was the deeper sense that volunteering and being helped in the Ergon Professional Hub is a place to discover the joy and value of responding to a need. It is a charitable work where the things that are discussed at School of Community go from being potential and intellectual to concrete experience.

If you are interested in participating in the Ergon Professional Hub, please send an email to: info@ergonhub.org.

Ellynore, Los Angeles, California