Liz Aeschlimann is an experienced community organizer, educator, and chaplain. She has spent the last decade helping people build transformative relationships and draw on wisdom tools for resilience, purpose, and powerful collective action. 

She began her journey as facilitator and organizer in Thailand and Eastern Kentucky, learning from communities organizing to resist global extractive capitalism, protect their water and land, and build economies based in solidarity.

Liz brought these passions to her work as a grassroots community organizer and Assistant Director of United Interfaith Action (UIA). At UIA, Liz developed volunteer leadership and built a coalition of 35 congregations to expand parent-teacher home visits, win approval for an innovative new public school, and gather over 18,000 signatures to raise the minimum wage.

Liz’s work with communities of faith and her questions about how to fuel long-lasting transformation brought her to divinity school. In the summer of 2016, Liz set out across the country to talk to people who were powerfully integrating spirituality and justice. Over two months, she interviewed 33 organizers, activists, and spiritual teachers in 6 states, and showed up at protests, meditation sittings, barbecues, and open mic nights with one question: “What are you doing that feels spiritual in your work?” The short answer was: getting mixed up with each other, and recognizing how mixed up with each other we already are. 

Building on the insights of those working at the intersections of spirituality and justice, Liz turned to the deep individual and communal accompaniment of college chaplaincy. As Rachlin Director for Jewish Student Life and Assistant Director for Religious and Spiritual Life at Vassar College, Liz led the department through a design thinking process to articulate a new vision of community building based in student insights, supported the design of a new space on campus, and piloted the Pratt Fellowship, a year-long community-building experience for 20 students from diverse networks across campus. 

Liz has an M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Carleton College with B.A. in Cognitive Science. She shares a Watertown, MA, triple-decker with her wife, sister-in-law, two close friends, and an anxious dog named Widget.