ABOUT QUEER SANGHA

Lawrence Grecco, Director

Lawrence Grecco is a practicing Zen Buddhist and contemplative life coach. He works intimately with people on a wide range of issues, including career transition, stress reduction, and spirituality. He holds a certificate in Foundations in Buddhist Chaplaincy from the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. As part of his training he provided spiritual care for terminally ill patients at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York hospice.

Currently he volunteers with the Lineage Project, teaching meditation to at-risk and incarcerated youth ages 10 to 21. For many years he worked as a crisis counselor at the Long Island Crisis Center. In 1985 he co-founded a youth group called LIGALY where he served as Co-Director until 1992. He is the Director of Queer Sangha which meets regularly at the New York Insight Meditation Center in Manhattan.

Charisa Smith, Contributing Facilitator

Charisa Smith is a Soto Zen Buddhist student of Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara at the Village Zendo in lower Manhattan.  Charisa began to meditate in 2005, and her first sangha experience was at Ekoji Buddhist Sangha in Richmond, VA.

Charisa has been a juvenile justice, LGBTQ youth, and social equity activist; and a motivational speaker, for 12 years.  She is a licensed attorney who dreamed of being a nun as child and has embarked upon a journey to ordain as a lay Zen priest someday.  Charisa finds comfort knowing that the path itself is both the means and the end, and also neither of those limited concepts, from a Zen perspective.

 Charisa sees spiritual devotion and social justice activism as one in the same.  She is also the author of Blending Colors From Life: Trenton's Own Watercolorist, Tom Malloy (2007), a biography and art book celebrating the late Tom Malloy.  Charisa currently coordinates the New York Task Force on Racial Disparities in the Juvenile Justice System, for the Community Justice Network for Youth (CJNY), of the W. Haywood Burns Institute.  She finds joy in helping bring queer Buddhists and their allies and friends together in Queer Sangha.