Our Staff

Welcoming the Stranger has very few pay personnel: a full-time Director, one part-time Program Coordinator, and a part-time Administrative Assistant. We primarily rely on volunteers to provide our services. Each term our active volunteers help with teaching, events, fundraising, outreach, and administration. We are only able to carry out our mission because of them. Thank you!

Patricia Lorenz
Executive Director

Patricia Lorenz is a native of Colombia and a bilingual Human Resources professional with a BS in Social Work and extensive education and experience in performance management and workforce engagement and training. Before coming to the United States, she directed HR departments with as many as 450 employees and taught classes at the National University of Colombia. She immigrated to the U.S. from Colombia in 2012.

Patricia Lorenz’s association with Welcoming the Stranger began in 2016, when she was a student seeking greater English fluency. By 2017, she had become a volunteer, in February of 2018, she became the first person to fill the newly designated staff position of Administrative Assistant, in 2020 she was performing the Acting Director duties and in January 2021 Patricia assumed the role of Executive Director for WTS.

Susan Roop
Program Coordinator

Susan began teaching English as a Second Language classes, largely on a volunteer basis, while still working as a public sector attorney. In 2018, when the class that she had been teaching for many years in Lambertville, NJ, was added to Welcoming the Stranger’s catalogue of classes geared to the needs of adult immigrants and refugees, Susan became part of the WTS family of volunteers.

Susan, who has degrees from Skidmore College, the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University School of Law, began her professional life as a high school English teacher and then as an 8th and 9th grade teacher of Reading/Language Arts, where she created a reading resource room and designed programs and materials for struggling students. After retiring from the practice of law, Susan has devoted her time to a variety of volunteer activities, with the main focus being the teaching of English to immigrants in the Bucks County, PA and Hunterdon County, NJ areas. In many ways, Susan’s career has come full circle, back to the challenges, energy and vibrancy of classes (virtual or in real life) of students eager to improve their English language skills and expand the range of opportunities available to them in this country.