This article was originally published in the 2026 issue of focus magazine, the annual publication of the BU School of Theology. This article can be found on page 18. By Steve Holt. Illustrations by Stephanie Singleton.
Hope for Self-Injury through Scar Revision
Kate Leavey’s mission in life found her, and it was born from a crisis in her own home.
In 2020, Leavey (’99) discovered that her youngest daughter, who’d survived an assault in 2019 at age 13, was self-injuring as a way to cope with debilitating depression. Leavey began listen – ing to podcasts and reading everything she could to learn about the behavior. She discovered that reports of self-injury, which is classified as a social contagion, had skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the International Society for the Study of Self-Injury, as many as 35 percent of young people ages 12–22 harm their own bodies. And she found that social media algorithms “fed a lonely kid what they were searching for” and are “almost a how-to guide in self-injury.”
Leavey’s daughter was in counseling for her mental health, but she still had the physical reminders of what she was going through in the form of “angry” scars on the inside of her arms. Leavey reached out to an aesthetician friend to learn about scars, and the friend offered to try to make the marks less noticeable. Using laser technology, Newton, Mass.-based clinician Lizabeth Glynn was able to drain all of the color from them.
“Something came back to life in my kid—hope,” Leavey says of the period after her daughter’s scar revision. “She’s a gifted athlete, and that revision was enough for my kid to put her track uniform back on. She had not competed in a year, and three months later she was at a national track meet and became a nationally ranked athlete.”
Filled with gratitude for her daughter’s progress, Leavey realized she could bring that same hope to others who’d experienced self-injury. She says scar revision, which can cost thousands of dollars for each treatment, is siloed from mental health treatment. “The more I investigated, the more I realized nobody had connected these dots,” Leavey says.
In 2023, she set out to do just that. She founded Spark Hope Scar Revision Project, a nonprofit that provides free scar revision treatment and works to reduce the stigma around self-injury. Her friend Cathy Carswell runs operations, and Richard “Rox” Anderson, a Massachusetts General Hospital dermatologist who developed the patented scar revision technologies that make Spark Hope possible, provides medical consulting. Glynn came on as a clinical adviser and board member. Participants work with their mental health therapist to determine their emotional readiness for scar revision and then apply for treatment. In its initial proof-of-concept pilot, Spark Hope served 21 individuals and has just launched Hope in Action, a new pilot in Massachusetts and New Hampshire designed for scalability and to engage donors so the program can expand wherever the need exists. By integrating scar revision with mental health treatment, the program addresses both the physical scars and the hidden emotional wounds they represent—advancing prevention while improv – ing quality of life.
“In addition to the direct impact on participants, this initiative offers a significant opportunity to contribute to the field of knowledge by studying how scar revision linked to mental health influences mental health outcomes and overall well-being,” Leavey says.
Leavey, who has a master’s degree in sacred music from the BU School of Theology, served as director of Liturgical Arts at Boston College, and now directs Sound & Spirit, an intergenerational choir. Leavey has a story not unlike those of STH alumni bringing hope into their corners of the world in a variety of disciplines—including law, social work, and food and environmental justice.
“I stumbled upon a mission that is really beautiful, deeply hopeful, and uniquely of this time,” Leavey says. “It addresses an unmet need of the world, and what an honor to get to do the work of sparking hope.”
Environmentalist, Social Entrepreneur, and Community Builder
The town of Klamath Falls, in south central Oregon, sits on the shores of the massive Upper Klamath Lake, the 700-mile Cascade Mountain range standing sentinel in the distance. The area around the town, with millions of acres of evergreens, spring-fed rivers, and wetlands, is a destination for hikers and paddlers and those passing through from Northern California to Crater Lake National Park and picturesque Bend to the north. Klamath County, which is roughly the area of Connecticut, also embodies many of the challenges facing America’s West: a history of white colonization and marginalization of Indigenous populations, the decline of timber and agricultural industries, and water scarcity. This complicated tapestry is precisely what drew Alex Froom and his family to the area in 2020 after years working in the Navajo Nation in northeast Arizona, near the New Mexico border.
“The ecology of the Klamath Basin and the myriad challenges and opportunities for human life here matched our lifestyle and desire for a smalltown quality of life,” Froom (’12, SSW’12) says. “We knew we wanted to start a business of some kind that connected food and land and people.”
Froom and his wife, Malu, are renovating and reimagining a landmark building in downtown Klamath Falls that will bring people together around food, art, and recreation, and will celebrate the ecological beauty—and fragility—of the region. The largely vacant, nearly century-old building, which the Frooms purchased in 2021, is being rebuilt using energy-efficient principles. It will house an artisan bakery (run by the Frooms), a climbing gym, an art gallery, an event space, its own greywater treatment facility, and walkable outdoor spaces. They’re calling it Watershed Row and expect to open it in 2026.
Froom, who earned master’s degrees in divinity and social work while at BU, worked with Navajo youth and built local food systems in Arizona before moving to Oregon. In addition to his work launching Watershed Row, Froom serves on the board of Klamath Grown, a food hub that connects local farmers and ranchers directly with retail and wholesale buyers.
“Behind a lot of our work with food, the built environment, salvaged material, and water is the belief that we can collaborate with matter toward a place of diversity and resilience,” Froom says. “If we’re faithful to that partnership with the creation, new things will come.”
Spirit-Led Social Worker and Counselor
Bridget Kinahan was a relatively new Christian when she enrolled in the School of Theology to learn more about her faith.
“I’d always thought of myself as social justice–oriented,” says Kinahan (’24, SSW’24), who completed a Master of Divinity alongside a Master of Social Work at BU. “At that time, I didn’t know that theology could also be social justice–oriented. I thought I would only be getting it [in the School of Social Work], but I ended up getting it in both.”
Kinahan draws on lessons from both programs in her work in community- based and inpatient mental health care. Most recently, she was a clinical social worker with the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health before taking a position running a substance use day program on Cape Cod in late 2025. Each day as a social worker is different, she says, whether she’s de-escalating someone experiencing psychosis, connecting a patient to a community resource, or leading a recovery meeting. Whatever she is doing, Kinahan says, she tries to do it in love—“as Jesus loved us.”
One of the lessons Kinahan applies most frequently came in an evangelism class at STH, of all places.
“I’d always thought of evangelism as going out with the scary signs and preaching to people, ‘You’re going to burn in hell,’” she says. “But evangelism is about hospitality, radical welcome, and treating others with kindness and decency. I try to think of my social work practice as evangelism, in a way, because I do think I’m preaching through my actions.”
Compassionate Arbiter of Justice
That Herman Griffin IV, the son of a Baptist preacher with a heart for pastoral ministry himself, would be given the title “Reverend” was almost a guarantee. The title of judge, though? That came as more of a surprise. On August 27, 2025, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer appointed Griffin (’25), an attorney who’d been overseeing the district’s 115 public defenders, to Detroit’s 36th District Court, where he presides over a range of cases, from traffic misdemeanors to nonviolent felonies.
Griffin pastored throughout Detroit, preaching in churches (including his father’s) and officiating funerals and weddings. After his mother suffered a massive stroke at Griffin’s graduation from Howard Divinity School, he spent the next three years as her primary caregiver before her death in 2009. He entered law school at the University of Michigan in honor of his late mother, who had enrolled years earlier in Boston College Law School but didn’t finish her degree. For 10 years, Griffin worked as a criminal defense attorney in the 36th District Court, arguing cases before all 30 judges there—including the one who would recommend him for the bench upon his retirement.
A few months before he was sworn in, Griffin completed STH’s hybrid Doctor of Ministry program, with an emphasis in transformational leadership—this time honoring his father, who always aspired to pursue a DMin. Griffin, who won STH’s Edith P. and Augustus G. Hare Preaching Prize for best text-based sermon, sees both ministry and the law as restorative in nature—“helping people in their most vulnerable moments.
“I say a prayer every time I zip up my robe,” he says. “I say, ‘Thank you for this opportunity. Let me lead today with integrity, humility, and compassion.’”