Service



Local Community Service - Each week throughout the school year, students in the freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior classes may volunteer at several agencies in the greater Worcester area.  These experiences familiarize Saint John's students with very real needs in the local community, and also typically help our students take a 'privileged' step out of their typical orbits. Recently, local community service sites have included the Nativity School of Worcester, Brigham Hill Community Farm / Worcester County Food Bank, and Saint Peter's Elementary School in Worcester.  Campus ministers and faculty provide transportation to/from and supervision at each such service site.



Junior Urban Encounter - Designed as a 36-hour urban immersion and offered several times throughout each school year (typically Thursday mornings through Friday afternoons), the Junior Urban Encounter exposes members of the junior class to a wide variety of service agencies and sites in the Worcester area, including Nativity Middle School, the Refugee Apostolate, Mustard Seed, Saint Joan of Arc Parish, Great Brook Valley, the Veterans' Shelter, Matthew 25, and Almost Home / Dismas House.  Campus ministers and faculty facilitate each Urban Encounter, and each Urban Encounter team has the rare experience of residing at the original Saint John's on Temple Street for the duration of their immersion.



Global Encounter West Virginia - Eight or nine sophomores, juniors, and seniors travel with two faculty each April vacation to Bethlehem Farm, in Pence Springs, West Virginia.  An intentional Catholic community, Bethelem Farm's permanent residents receive groups such as ours throughout the year, and task our student team with outreach work in the local Appalachian community each day.  In recent years, this work has included such things are helping residents insulate their houses, chopping wood, cleaning land and trails in a nearby state park, and work on the farm itself.  Typically, Saint John's team visits Bethlehem Farm at the very same time as another XBSS school, Xaverian Brothers High School of Westwood.  Our team drives to and from West Virginia, and resides for the week in a very beautiful two-story log cabin at Bethlehem Farm--with wraparound porches on both levels.



Global Encounter New Orleans - Offered each year since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in the late summer of 2005, Global New Orleans is a service immersion trip which has changed markedly each year--keeping pace with the needs of the New Orleans community.  Our service in New Orleans consisted largely of clean-up work in the first couple years of the immersion, and lately is moving on to more 'constructive' activities.  Insofar as is possible, every effort is also made to expose students to whatever cultural opportunities are available during the trip, offered during April vacation each year.  Housed by the Josephites on vacant floors of a parish rectory, our New Orleans team typically consists of about 15 juniors and seniors and three faculty.  Travel to and from Louisiana is, of course, by jet; and within New Orleans by rental vehicle and on foot.



Global Encounter Pine Ridge - During April break every other year (in odd numbered-years), a team of eight sophomores, juniors, and seniors is accompanied by two faculty in a service immersion experience on the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.  Team members aid the local community with various projects (eg - painting fences, insulating homes, cemetery and yard clean-up, and the like), and experience pieces of the life and culture on the poorest Native American reservation in the United States.  Off-site visits are also made to such places as Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial, Custer State Park, the Needles Forest, and the Badlands National Park.  Travel to and from South Dakota is by jet via Rapid City; and within South Dakota and the reservation by rental van and on foot.  Housing is courtesy of Our Lady of the Sioux Parish on Pine Ridge.



Global Encounter New York City - Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, this service immersion opportunity places students in contrasting experiences of poverty and wealth each day in the Big Apple.  Time each day is given to work in soup kitchens in Manhattan (Maryhouse and Saint Joseph House Catholic Worker communities), the Bronx (the Missionaries of Charity), and Brooklyn (CHIPS), and to work at a children's day camp in the Bronx (courtesy of City Year, a domestic 'Peace Corps' agency affiliated with Americorps); but then, also includes visits to sites such as the Metropolitan Museum, the United Nations, Rockefeller Center, the Museum of Modern Art, NBC Studios, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, Grand Central Terminal, Times Square, Wall Street, the World Trade Center site, and various chapels, churches, shrines, and cathedrals.  Accommodations are courtesy of Xaverian High School in Brooklyn, and meals are taken at various diners, at restaurants of note (eg - SouthWest NY at the World Financial Center, Pete's Tavern in Gramercy Park, the Bridge Cafe at South Street Seaport district), and in some of the soup kitchens and neighborhoods where we volunteer (eg - Arthur Avenue).  Travel to and from New York is by ground, and within and around the city by van, boat, subway, bus, and on foot.  Typically, about a dozen students and two faculty take part in this service immersion each year.



Global Encounter Ecuador - Hosted by Rostro de Cristo in the urban barrio of Duran--adjacent to the wealthy port city of Guayaquil--this truly 'global' service immersion trip puts about ten especially mature juniors and seniors and two faculty into daily contact with some of the poorest of the poor in a third-world nation, where we learn that the typical Ecuadorian subsists on no more than $1-2 per day.  Daily 'work' centers around games and activities organized for neighborhood children, visits to the homes of neighborhood families, and visits to such places as a leprosy hospital.  The team is accompanied each day by both Ecuadorian and American employees of Rostro de Cristo, and is helped in shopping for food and drink, and in meal preparation.  Travel to and from Ecuador is by jet; and within Ecuador on foot and by ground transportation arranged by Rostro de Cristo--whose domestic offices are housed at John Carroll University in Ohio.



Global Encounter Haiti - For the 2009-10 academic year, a service immersion experience in Les Cayes, Haiti, has been added to our Global Encounter offerings.  Hosted by Forward in Health, our team of a dozen upperclassmen and two faculty live and work--often in a medical setting--in the Caribbean nation that, in fact, is the poorest country in the western hemisphere.



Service Day - For a Saturday each May, more than 500 members of the local Saint John's community--students, faculty, staff, families--give a day of service to several dozen agencies in the greater Worcester region.  In recent years, Saint John's alumni chapters across the nation have joined in the effort, so that this year's event will be Saint John's 9th Annual National Day of Service.