It's the second week of TEEP, the Trinity Education for Excellence Program, which for 18 summers has filled Trinity Church with young people of color from across Boston. The new rising seventh graders have found their way from Bob and Ken's desk to the Undercroft where they are making new friends and learning new skills. Rising eighth and ninth graders are glad to be back with the TEEP family in a place that feels like a second home. For high school students in TEEP's Leadership Development Program, the summer began a week earlier with staff training. Along with the college staff, they are working as counselors, leaders in a community they first joined the summer after sixth grade.

TEEP offers a free, high-quality, five-week program for middle school students of color who otherwise would not have access to this kind of experience. After three years at TEEP, many will take summer jobs as mentors to their younger peers.

Did you go to a summer camp or a day program like TEEP? Did you return year after year, to a place that felt like a second home? Were you eventually paid as a program leader? If you answered yes to any of these questions, I suspect you remember the experience as key to your growth and development, and you understand how important it is for opportunities like this to be available to every child.

But access isn't equally distributed, is it? In a recent New York Times column, "How We Are Ruining America," David Brooks writes, "Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks." It is a piece about how money invested in young people pays dividends throughout their lives. And about how the escalating concentration of resources in wealthy communities privilege some children to the disadvantage of others who don't have the same access to opportunity. I am a mother who moved her family to Lexington for the top-rated schools; the column seems to speak directly to me.

And so it is that I am grateful for the opportunity to support TEEP not only in my daily work, but also as a donor. Through our gifts we stand with TEEP parents and invest with them in the lives of their children. The TEEP staff and students use those resources to create a community of inspiration, empowerment and affirmation. Watching a recent video on Instagram, I heard a TEEP student say, "I'm excited about TEEP this summer because I get to build community."

In the parable we'll hear on Sunday, the sower's seeds fall on a variety of terrains. The path, where birds snatch them up. Rocky ground, without enough soil to grow deep roots. Among the thorns, which choke them. But some of the seeds fall on good soil, and bring forth grain. There is no difference in the quality of the seeds, only in where they happen to fall.

TEEP is filled with good soil: young people of great promise and potential in the business of creating community and, I pray, of helping to change the world.

If you'd like to visit TEEP this summer, contact Donna Desilus. We'd love to introduce you to the amazing young people growing up in our midst.