Disciples Divinity House

Sandhya Jha, author of four books and founder of the Oakland Peace Center, has been elected to the Board of Trustees. An alumna and 2006 graduate of the University of Chicago’s joint MDiv and Public Policy program, she is a consultant, community organizer, and serves with the Emerging Leaders Program at the Leadership Institute at Allen Temple. In addition to founding the Oakland Peace Center, she is its former executive director and current Connections Consultant for OPC—a collective of forty organizations working to create equity, access, and dignity as the means of creating peace in Oakland and the Bay Area. She serves as an anti-racism/anti-oppression trainer with Reconciliation Ministries for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and, with Yvonne Gilmore, co-directs DDH’s Living Justice Project: An Anti-Racist Practicum. Her first book, Room at the Table (2009), a history of people of color in the Disciples of Christ, was followed by Pre-Post-Racial America: Spiritual Stories from the Front Lines (2014), Transforming Communities: How People Like You are Healing Their Neighborhoods (2017), and, most recently, Liberating Love (2020).

David Vargas, a member of the Board's Nominating Committee, stressed the importance of the "grass roots" perspective that Sandhya Jha brings to the Board's work of planning for and imagining the future of theological education at the Disciples Divinity House. Nominating Committee chair, Claudia Highbaugh, conveyed the committee's enthusiasm and welcome. Her three-year term on the twenty-one member board begins immediately.