As a child, Clare Dalton would watch her dad go off to teach seminary or institute and ask if she, too, might be able to do that one day. His answer was no, as back then, the church encouraged women to stay home with their families. “That made sense,” Clare says, considering all she’d observed at the time. But after growing up in Arizona, Clare would pursue many opportunities. She served an LDS mission in Barcelona, studied linguistics at the University of Arizona while coaching high school girls’ basketball and a variety of middle school sports, worked at a group home, used her bilingual skills to teach driver’s ed, did door to door sales—which she says is everything they say it is (lots of money, lots of crazy), then ultimately ended up back in her parents’ basement, wondering what was next. One day, her father asked her to substitute teach a seminary class. This time, there was space for a woman in that classroom and Clare had an awakening—finally able to combine her two passions of teaching and working with kids. Clare spent the next eight years being called Sister Dalton in Gilbert, Arizona high schools where parents and students regularly asked for their kids to be placed in her seminary class. That is, until she came out as gay…
THE HOLTRY FAMILY
“I’ll walk with you.” It started with a sticker stating those powerful words. The sticker was given to Brent and Jen Holtry by their close friends and neighbors, Monty and Annie Skinner. Brent had been tasked with coming up with the theme for their stake youth trek adventure that summer of 2020, and he loved the concept of “I’ll walk with you.” But like most great things, what would eventually become a revolutionary trek and movement for their Fair Oaks, CA stake was not without its growing pains and delays. In hindsight, the Holtrys are grateful: they needed more time. As the year 2020 progressed, it quickly became clear that the trek was not going to happen anytime soon with the shifting guidelines of the global pandemic. This gave Brent more time to think and cull and create the needed trek plan. It also gave Brent and Jen more hallowed time at home to tend to their youngest child, Jackson, who as it turns out, would need his parents to walk alongside him that summer of 2020, when he came out.
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