Walking Side by Side: Celebrating Five Years of Outreach
OUTREACH 2026
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., June 19-21, 2026
Outreach 2026 will gather LGBTQ lay people, clergy, scholars, artists, educators, students and family members to celebrate five years of Outreach ministry.
Our three-day conference, which will be held at Georgetown University from June 19 to 21, 2026, will feature keynote presentations, panels, liturgies and opportunities for networking and friendship.
More information about registration will be available in early 2026. Sign up for the Outreach weekly newsletter to be the first to know when registration opens.
Select Speakers and Special Guests
Kerry A. Robinson
President and CEO
Catholic Charities USA
Cardinal Robert W. McElroy
Archdiocese of Washington D.C.
James Keenan, S.J.
Vice Provost for global engagement
Boston College
James Martin, S.J.
Founder, Outreach, and editor-at-large, America
Craig A. Ford, Jr., Ph.D.
Theological ethicist and moral theologian
Candler School of Theology
Danielle Koutsoufis
Writer and music minister
Sabina Marroquin
Campus minister
University of Dayton
More speakers will be announced soon!
Kerry A. Robinson
Kerry Alys Robinson is President and CEO of Catholic Charities USA. Ms. Robinson was the founding executive director of Leadership Roundtable and now serves as a member of its board of trustees. A member of the Raskob Foundation for Catholic Activities and FADICA (Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities), Ms. Robinson has been an advisor to and trustee of more than 25 grant-making foundations, charitable nonprofits and family philanthropies.
Ms. Robinson also served as the executive director of the Opus Prize Foundation, which is responsible for an annual international million-dollar prize honoring people of faith whose lives are dedicated to the alleviation of human suffering. She received the Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame in 2025.
Ms. Robinson served as the director of development for Saint Thomas More Catholic Chapel and Center at Yale University and led a successful $75 million dollar fundraising drive to expand and endow the chapel’s intellectual and spiritual ministry and to construct a Catholic student center on Yale’s campus. Ms. Robinson is the author of the prize-winning book, Imagining Abundance: Fundraising, Philanthropy, and A Spiritual Call to Service.
Cardinal Robert W. McElroy
Cardinal Robert McElroy is Archbishop of Washington and a member of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life.
A native of San Francisco, he was appointed auxiliary bishop of San Francisco by Pope Benedict XVI on July 6, 2010, and became the archdiocesan vicar for parish life and development, serving in that role until his appointment as bishop of San Diego in March 2015.
Pope Francis appointed him to the College of Cardinals in 2022 and then appointed Cardinal McElroy as the eighth Archbishop of Washington on January 6, 2025.
With undergraduate and master’s degrees in history from Harvard University, and a doctorate in American history from Stanford University, Cardinal McElroy writes and speaks frequently about U.S. society, including a passionate defense for the rights of migrants, LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups.
James Keenan, S.J.
James F. Keenan, S.J., is Boston College’s Vice Provost of Global Engagement as well as its Canisius Chair and Director of the Jesuit Institute. In 2003 he founded Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church, an international network of 1200 Catholic ethicists. Keenan received the John Courtney Murray Lifetime Achievement Award from the Catholic Theological Society of America and from 2020-2021 was president of the Society of Christian Ethics. He has written more than 400 essays, reviews and articles, published 12 book length manuscripts, including A History of Catholic Theological Ethics (2022) and The Moral Life (2023), and edited 13 other collected works. Finally, he is the founding editor of the Georgetown University Press Moral Traditions Series, which published 52 books during his twenty year tenure with them.
James Martin, S.J.
James Martin, S.J., is a Jesuit priest, the editor at large at America Media and founder of Outreach. He is also a consultor to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication and a member of the Synod of Bishops. Father Martin is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, Jesus: A Pilgrimage and Learning to Pray. His most recent book is Come Forth: The Promise of Jesus’s Greatest Miracle. His book Building a Bridge, about LGBTQ Catholics, has been translated into nine languages.
Craig A. Ford, Jr., Ph.D.
Craig A. Ford, Jr. (Ph.D., Boston College) is visiting assistant professor of Christian ethics in the Candler School of Theology at Emory University (Atlanta). He is also on the faculty at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana (New Orleans), the United States’s only Catholic Historically Black College or University (H.B.C.U.).
Dr. Ford writes on topics at the intersection of moral theology, queer theology/queer theory, and Black studies. In addition to publishing numerous articles in popular outlets like Outreach, Commonweal, the National Catholic Reporter, and the New Ways Ministry blog, Dr. Ford is the author of a number of widely-cited academic essays, including “Transgender Bodies, Catholic Schools, and a Queer Natural Law Theology of Exploration” (Journal of Moral Theology, 2018), and “Our New Galileo Affair” (Horizons, 2023), which received the 2022 Catherine Mowry LaCugna Award for Best Essay by a young scholar from the Catholic Theological Society of America. His current book project, Works of Art: Gender and Sexuality in Liberative Natural Law Perspective is being published by Fortress Press. During the 2024-2025 academic year, Dr. Ford served as the Lund-Gill Chair at Dominican University (Chicago, IL).
Danielle Koutsoufis
Danielle Koutsoufis is a transgender woman who serves her community as a firefighter and as a music minister and cantor in the Archdiocese of Boston.
Sabina Marroquin
Sabina Marroquin is a campus minister for faith formation and spiritual accompaniment at the University of Dayton, where she serves the LGBTQ community.
Outreach 2026 Young Adult Committee
Outreach is pleased to announce the inaugural Young Adult Committee, which will assist with Outreach 2026 in various capacities, including conference planning, on-site leadership roles, virtual events and community building activities.

Angelo Jesus Canta, S.J.
Jersey City, NJ

Isaac Cardenas
Los Angeles, CA

Valentina Marquez
South Bend, IN

Sabina Marroquin
Dayton, OH

Harry Rose
Providence, RI

Michael Sennett
Boston, MA

Brent Taghap
Chicago, IL

Ryan Wachter
Durham, NC
Registration
Registration for Outreach 2026 is anticipated to open in late 2025. Sign up for Outreach’s weekly newsletter to be the first to know when registration opens. Please note that registration is first come, first served, and that recent Outreach conferences have sold out.
More information about hotel blocks and other important travel tips will be available in early 2026.
Schedule and Agenda
Outreach 2026 will begin with a welcome reception on Friday, June 19, 2026, and conclude on the afternoon of Sunday, June 21, 2026. The conference will include keynote addresses, several timely and compelling panels, multiple opportunities for worship, shared meals as well as time for community building.
More detailed information on the agenda will be available in early 2026.
Panel topics
The Outreach conference will feature keynote addresses, several timely and compelling panels, multiple opportunities for worship as well as time for community building.
Panel topics will include:
- LGBTQ Ministry in Parishes Track
- Outreach Guide to the Bible and Homosexuality
- Transgender Catholics and the Church
- Catholic LGBTQ Women and the Church
- LGBTQ Catholic Perspectives
- The Catholic Church Today
- Theology and LGBTQ Catholics
- Promoting Positive Well-being for LGBTQ Catholics
Affinity groups
Outreach 2026 will feature special opt-in gatherings for:
- Parents of LGBTQ Children
- Young Adult LGBTQ Catholics
Worship
- Welcome Mass with Father James Martin, S.J.
- Evening prayer service
- Adoration and Sacrament of Reconciliation
- Saturday Vigil Mass with Cardinal Robert McElroy
- Sunday prayer service
OUTREACH 2026