Assistant to the Dean of Faculty and Coordinator of Academic Programs
Staff
Peter Olandt became Starr King’s Assistant to the Dean of Faculty and the Coordinator of Academic Programming in January of 2017. Committed to countering oppressions, Peter has worked at the intersections of spirituality, racial and economic justice and is dedicated to helping cultivate positive, engaged citizens of all ages. He brings a wealth of experience to Starr King having worked in business, non-profit administration, and academia.
Peter began his career studying Galapagos Tortoises with a lab at Yale University, and then worked on the Human Genome Project discovering 100 novel genes. He also worked at M.I.T.’s Broad Institute on the mouse genome project before deciding to pursue a career working more closely to counter oppressions.
He attended Starr King and graduated with an M.Div in 2010. Inspired by Starr King’s focus on ECO and drawn to alternative possibilities for liberal religious leadership, he worked with adults with different abilities while laying the framework for a project that became known as Beloved Café.
He and others came together to create the benefit corp Beloved Café, a cafe storefront with educational, spiritual, and social justice programming. It was built on the principles of Beloved Economy (more often known as Ethical Economy) where it strived to create an economy based around rewarding those who work to improve everyone in the world instead of greed.
After three years as CEO, he moved on to Blacksburg, VA where Peter taught ethics, religious pluralism, and logic at Radford University. Every course he taught there incorporated explicit and implicit elements of the ECO work he learned at Starr King. He and his wife moved back to the Bay area when she received the Chaplain position at Mill’s College.
