Service and Community Engagement

The 402 Service Program offers participants the opportunity to engage deeply with a single community partner throughout the semester. By committing to serve every week, participants build lasting relationships, contribute meaningfully to their partner organization and develop a deeper understanding of the community’s needs. Participants also engage in reflection with their group each week. Transportation is provided. Program times are available Mondays through Saturdays so you can find what fits your schedule! 

Completely KIDS and Kellom Elementary: Participants serve off campus as mentors and reading buddies with elementary aged children in an after-school program.

DREAM: When you join DREAM, you can live out the pillars of community, mentorship and building relationships by volunteering every week at Howard Kennedy or Hartman Elementary school. Participation throughout your time at Creighton is encouraged as we build the community of DREAM volunteers. A successful DREAM volunteer will be flexible and a positive role model.

Jesuit Academy: Tutor 4th–8th grade boys at Jesuit Academy, a middle school in North Omaha. Build relationships, be a mentor and partner with hardworking students to achieve academic success.

International Council for Immigrants and Refugees (IRCI): Facilitate interactive STEM activities in this after school program for elementary and middle school students from immigrant families.

Omaha Public Schools Welcome Center: Participants meet immigrant and refugee community members with Omaha Public Schools (OPS) and engage in direct service as a conversation and reading partner with adults and/or as an aide with young children learning English.

Yates Illuminates: Participants serve as conversation partners and teaching assistants in an English language class. They will have the opportunity to form relationships with immigrant adults and learn about different cultures.

Community. Reflection. Education. Weekly. C.R.E.W. for Social Justice provides opportunities for Creighton students to learn and serve in areas related to health, the environment and migration.

Creighton students can join the Schlegel Center for Service and Justice (SCSJ) for drop-in service with a variety of community partners such as Siena Francis House, Intercultural Senior Center and City Sprouts. They can attend once or multiple times across the semester. Students can sign up each week they want to serve (if a site is full, they can join the waitlist). After each service experience, we reflect upon it as a community. Transportation is provided.

If you are a current student, sign up on Creighton Engage. (Login required.)

Participants are asked to pay $350 for a full-week trip and $250 for a five-day trip. The true cost of each trip is over $600 a person, but we are able to keep prices low because of fundraising.

Even if finances are a little tight, there is a scholarship application for students seeking need-based financial aid for their trip. If a scholarship does not cover the total amount of the financial need, the SCSJ can also set up a payment plan to spread the payments out over the course of the semester.

On the Service and Justice Trips application, participants rank a variety of social justice issues that they have an interest in learning about. The Core Team tries to take the top two to three interests of all participants and match them up with a corresponding site. Unfortunately, because of the size of the program and the number of spots available at each site, we are not always able to guarantee someone’s top choice.

We try our best to split up students who know each other particularly well (roommates, best friends, folks dating each other, relatives…) because it allows participants to meet new people. While this is not always possible, it’s certainly a goal.

All trips are in the United States and within a day to a day-and-a-half drive of Omaha. Your group will likely travel to your site in a Creighton vehicle or rented van.

Each site is different. Groups stay in churches, post-grad volunteer program houses, Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality, or with community organizations. You will have access to showers and all necessary (though often simple!) facilities. A sleeping bag is a helpful item as participants often sleep on floors with sleeping bags. More information about specific host site arrangements will be given before the trip.

People are in need now, so we need to serve them.

Service is a value that is strongly rooted in all faith traditions and can take a variety of forms. It might include repairing houses, helping at a soup kitchen or tutoring in under-resourced schools. It also might include ministry of presence with someone who yearns for a person to listen to his or her story. On each Service and Justice Trip, we try to include some form of meaningful service work that puts students in direct contact with members of their host community. Each community has identified specific needs, and our hope is to work with community members to meet some of these needs during our trips.

Service and justice are tightly intertwined, often being called the two feet of social change. While service is important to meet the current needs that people may have, it often does not address root causes. Justice is important to change social structures on behalf of the poor and marginalized. Service and Justice Trips are inspired by an influential document from Jesuit General Congregation 32 that talks about the “service of faith of which the promotion of justice is an absolute necessity.”

Each Service and Justice Trip engages one or more justice issues, from education to healthcare, civil rights to immigration. By the end of each Service and Justice Trip, after completing social analysis, we hope to put ideas into action to change some of the social systems that are perpetuating an unjust world.

“We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.” -Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ.

Solidarity, as expressed in the encyclical On Social Concern, is “not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people,” but rather “it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good…because we are all really responsible for all.”

Simplicity and sustainability are closely related, with simplicity focusing on an individual lifestyle refraining from over-consumption. Although it may or may not be the intent of a simple living practitioner, living simply may contribute to a more sustainable future.

Life can get complex. Sometimes we need to strip away some of that complexity to remember what is truly important. Focusing on simplicity allows us to reconnect with what is essential. Through simplicity, participants can explore and question how their own lifestyles are connected to and interdependent with the lives of others.

Sustainability refers to our ability as a society and a species to sustain our existence over time. If we are going to do this, we need to have large systemic global change and some major lifestyle changes.

Catholic Social Thought teaches that though we are individuals, we are always individual in the context of a community. Each individual is sacred, but so is the community. An African proverb puts it this way: “I am because we are, and we are because I am.”

We strive to build positive relationships both within the Creighton team and with the people of the host site. We realize that participants are not simply individuals who experience Service and Justice Trips on their own, but rather that they are persons in a group who can support and challenge one another throughout their experience. Through Service and Justice Trips, we provide participants with the opportunity to learn about the dynamics of community and community-building.

Reflection is the integrating process that helps make meaning of service and justice experiences by placing them in dialogue with the other parts of our lives. Within the context of Service and Justice Trips, reflection is often as important as the service performed on a given day. Each evening during the trips, groups gather for an hour or so to reflect on the day’s experiences. Many participants find this activity to be the most rewarding of the week.