Since his graduation in 1986, Smoker has spent his career supporting people who help others. He currently works as an IT specialist with the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Community Services Board (CSB). The agency, which employs approximately 250 people working at various locations in the area, provides services to individuals and families affected by behavioral health issues or developmental disabilities.

“If I look back over my career, I like helping people who I think are doing good work,” he said. “I may not be going with food shipments to the Horn of Africa, but I’m helping people send those shipments. I’m not doing therapy for someone with substance abuse or addiction, but I’m helping a clinician do that work.”

After Messiah, Smoker spent three years with Goodville Mutual Casualty Company in New Holland, Pennsylvania. Started in 1926, the company was moving into the new digital world and Smoker was laying the infrastructure, using a mid-range IBM and a thick binder-filled cabinet stocked with programming manuals.

“Basically, I looked around and if we needed a program, I wrote it,” he said. “I wrote programs that handled policies, insurance information, and claims. Remember the Internet was there, but not available to everyone, so what you needed, you created yourself.”

In 1990, Smoker joined Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), working in the computer services department in Akron, Pennsylvania. He was there for 12 of the next 13 years. By chance, he became the first computer services manager for Self-Help Crafts, an MCC venture that supported international artisans (Self-Help Crafts eventually became Ten Thousand Villages, which now employs a full-service IT department, including Rick Rutt ‘84, see page 23).

In 2003, LeVon and wife Cindy, who had also worked with MCC, moved to Harrisonburg.  With Cindy working in EMU’s development office (she is its office coordinator), LeVon decided to attend seminary, where he earned a master’s of religion in 2006 and was a stay-at-home dad to their son, then in middle school (now an EMU junior).

“I really wanted to know more about peace theology,” Smoker said. “I had gotten into enough debates and arguments in my church about why we should be embodying this theology rather than making excuses for causing death and destruction that I really wanted to study it,” Smoker said. “I wrote my thesis on the conflict between the American narrative and the Gospel narrative and how words like ‘freedom’ and ‘sacrifice,’ so prevalent in the Gospel narrative, are used and abused in the American nationalistic narrative.”

Smoker says his seminary work has informed his involvement at Park View Mennonite Church more than it has his current position, but it’s clear that he, as well as the many other computer specialists involved with non-profit or not-for-profit work profiled in this issue, seeks values-driven engagement with their professional skills.

His current position as IT specialist is a generic title, Smoker says, that enables him to do a little bit of whatever is needed. Still, his main skill is writing programs for CSB needs. “I write a script, extract the data, convert that data to files for various clinicians who would be interested or affected, write a report,” he said, adding that he takes an occasional turn at the “help desk.”

Smoker calls programming “a sophisticated way to be lazy and look productive,” but this definition is slightly tongue in check. When he finds himself doing something over and over, he says his response is to “write a script so the computer does it for me.”

Ten Thousand Villages, too, has mission roots. It was founded in 1946 by Edna Ruth Byler, wife of an MCC administrator, during a trip to Puerto Rico. Still a nonprofit partner of MCC, the company is a fair trade organization that brokers artisanal crafts from disadvantaged people around the world.

Working mainly with inventory and accounting systems, Rutt customizes both to meet the business’s changing needs. He designs reports and extracts data, as well as providing troubleshooting services.

“A tremendous amount of information is needed to import goods from 30 different countries and then distribute them to almost 80 branded retail stores and other wholesale accounts,” Rutt said. “We would not be able to do what we do without computers and the programs that run on them.”

He is one of eight people in the company’s IT department (see page 18 for a profile of alumnus LeVon Smoker, who was the first IT employee for SELFHELP Crafts of the World, as the organization was known until 1996).

Rutt actually had little computer training at EMU, arriving on campus when the technology was in its infancy in the early 1980s.  Attracted to the rigor and discipline of the hard sciences, Rutt double-majored in chemistry and math (his non-Euclidean geometry course was what really taught him to “think outside the box,” he remembers). His two computer courses were electives in an otherwise busy schedule.

But when doing voluntary service with Eastern Mennonite Missions at University of Alabama in Birmingham, he began handling and extracting data for research projects and when his year of service ended, he was hired at UAB, eventually becoming a programmer.  “They were glad to have someone who understood the nature of the research, even though I didn’t have a degree in programming.”

Six years later, he was still at University of Alabama when he met future wife, Michelle, also working on a voluntary service assignment. Together, they ran a Ten Thousand Villages Festival Sale each December for five years.

In 2000, wanting their two children closer to both sets of grandparents, the Rutts moved back to Lancaster County and Rutt began work at Ten Thousand Villages. Both daughters attend Lancaster Mennonite High School. Katie, 17, is a senior and Joy, 14, is a freshman.

The Rutts attend Landisville Mennonite Church. Rick, a former Sunday school teacher and superintendent, recently began serving as assistant treasurer.