By Gerald Korson
Voice correspondent

Volunteer service opportunities and Catholic social teaching have long been available at St. Mary’s College in Moraga. For the past decade, however, the Catholic Institute For Lasallian Social Action (CILSA) has been turning social-justice education and awareness up a few notches by promoting, coordinating and integrating these activities into a holistic curricular and co-curricular experience for students and faculty alike.

CILSA is designed to foster a culture of service and social justice through academic exploration, critical reflection, and personal involvement — what the program refers to as “engaged teaching and learning,” or a “head, heart and hands” framework.

Under the CILSA umbrella, students may study social-justice issues in a number of courses across the curriculum, conduct community-based research in order to develop action plans to correct or alleviate injustice in particular areas, and participate in “service-learning” by providing direct hands-on assistance to the needy.

Although student participation in CILSA is voluntary, some courses with social-justice content in various disciplines consider service to be part of the course requirements. In such instances, “The service is required like a reading assignment or term paper because the service is seen as a way of teaching and learning,” said CILSA director Marshall Welch.

What makes the CILSA program at St. Mary’s unique and different from volunteer service programs at other colleges is that “its cornerstone is the LaSallian mission and Catholic social thought,” Welch said. That mission is what brought him to St. Mary’s after 20 years in a similar position with the University of Utah.

“I was intrigued by the fact that social justice was part of the mission and that the institution was not apologetic about it at all,” he said. “In fact, it was pretty much in-your-face: ‘This is who we are, and this is what we do.’”

(“LaSallian” refers to the ideals of the Christian Brothers, sponsors of St. Mary’s College, who were founded by St. John Baptist de la Salle.)
St. Mary’s students participate in CILSA in a variety of ways. Through the Bonner Leader Program, they learn social-justice leadership and commit to serving hundreds of hours in the local community.

In Jumpstart, they receive training as they implement curricula, build literacy and conduct classroom activities for preschool children of disadvantaged backgrounds. In Engaged Learning Facilitators, a new program introduced last fall, student leaders receive training and serve an internship in providing support to faculty, students and community agencies in service-learning and community-based research courses.

Students also participate in 24-hour immersion experiences, hunger banquets, an annual kids’ carnival, spring and new-student service projects, and four different CILSA committees.

Faculty members have opportunities to develop as social-justice leaders and educators as well. Each year, CILSA sponsors a “Faculty Development Cohort for Engaged Pedagogy” to help teachers explore how to modify or create courses to include a social-justice focus.

The cohort consists of Camp CILSA, a one-day workshop to introduce the concept of engaged pedagogy; a day-long community-service immersion, and a two-day institute for group discussion and reflection. Personal consultation also is available to teachers throughout the year.

The purpose of the faculty immersion experience, held in the troubled Tenderloin district of San Francisco, is to “give the faculty a similar experience to what students have, and then reflect on it,” Welch said.

The college recently created a new core curriculum to be implemented over the next one to two years. The curriculum, said Welch, is built upon the principles of support for the common good and active engagement in the community. A key to those foundations is the kind of collaboration CILSA seeks to establish with the agencies and organizations in which St. Mary’s students are involved.

“We emphasize partnership over placement,” Welch said. “Sometimes when schools go into the community without establishing a partnership relationship, they end up doing more harm than good. We empower them rather than enable them through a mutually beneficial relationship.”

The exchange is that while participating students “have an amazing learning experience beyond what they are learning in their classes,” the community partners help faculty and students in their research of social justice issues.

In 2008-09, for example, doctoral students in education worked with the Family Literacy Project in North Richmond to collect and analyze data on the impact of parental involvement on a student’s academic success, the effectiveness of English instruction for non-native speakers, and the developmental growth of preschool children.

The CILSA success story is spreading. The initiative has been recognized on a national level by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the coveted President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.

Welch and other CILSA staffers have been invited to facilitate workshops and contribute book chapters on the success of the St. Mary’s program and on other topics related to service-learning and higher education.

As for other long-term goals, Welch said he hopes to create more fellowships so that both faculty and students can devote longer stretches of time to comprehensive social-justice projects and research. CILSA also plans to start an endowment center as part of its 10th anniversary celebration.

For more information, visit www.stmarys-ca.edu/cilsa.

By Gerald Korson
Voice correspondent

One woman was inspired by a garbage dump. The other responded to a broken heart.
Together, they are changing lives for the better — beginning with their own.

For Megan Colla and Lindsay Ryberg, their participation in an integrated social-justice initiative at St. Mary’s College in Moraga became a catalyst for altering their outlook on the world and the direction of their future plans.

The personal transformation for these 2008 graduates began in their sophomore year, when they both took a St. Mary’s “Jan Term” offering called “Living Dangerously: Discipleship in Action,” a course developed through the Catholic Institute for LaSallian Social Action. CILSA seeks to educate students through a process of “engaged teaching and learning” of social justice through classroom education, reflection and active service in the community.

The class “was the first time I realized that if we are to call ourselves Christians, our hearts need to break” over poverty and injustice around the world, said Ryberg. “Well, my heart definitely broke, and that class ignited in us a passion to make change in whatever way we could.”

The two women learned about unjust labor conditions and decided to do something about it.

“We set out to make our campus clothing products sweatshop-free,” Colla said. Since both were sophomore senators in student government, they crafted a bill that would require that all clothing bought through the student association and its clubs “must come from companies that specifically state their products are sweatshop-free.” The proposal ultimately passed.

Both women became more involved in social justice work. In their senior year, Colla traveled with a group to Central America where they visited La Chureca, a huge garbage dump in Nicaragua where many families survive by scavenging for discarded food and recyclable materials.

“It seemed an eternity driving through witnessing the magnitude of poverty all around us,” Colla said. “It was unlike anything I had ever seen before. . . . I knew I couldn’t go back to living every day without trying to somehow help these people.”

During that trip, she met Yamileth Perez, a woman who spent four years in the dump with her child before escaping that life by learning to make and sell jewelry and other crafts. Perez went on to organize a fair-trade cooperative where she and others could make and sell merchandise. Upon returning home, Colla met up with Ryberg to share her experiences and to discuss what they could do to help people like Perez.

“Lindsay and I thought that if we could create a demand for these products, we could begin creating sustainable jobs for people in Nicaragua like Yamileth,” Colla said.

So the two friends founded Just Hearts and began importing and marketing fair-trade goods made by poor artisans in Nicaragua, Thailand and Uganda. By purchasing and selling these products on the Internet and at local outlets, they are in effect providing steady employment for the artisans at a fair wage.
The increased awareness of social justice issues through CILSA had a profound effect on the lives of these two women.


Bracelets made by artisans in Uganda are among the fair-trade products imported and marketed by Just Hearts.
 
“I already knew before my junior year that I didn’t want to work in the field of my major, sports management,” said Colla, who presently works for two non-profit organizations that provide legal assistance to low-income families in San Francisco.

“I wanted to do something to promote social justice. Seeing the dump my senior year definitely confirmed that.” She now plans to pursue a master’s degree in social work, non-profit management or social entrepreneurship.

Ryberg, a business major from Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., said that CILSA “fueled the organization that God put on both our hearts to start.” She hopes to build Just Hearts into her full-time occupation.

Just Hearts benefits from a startup grant that enables the non-profit to funnel their profits back into Third World village economies, she said.

“God uses CILSA in some pretty sweet ways,” Ryberg said, “and we’re so appreciative of the ways they’ve poured into Just Hearts, Megan and me.”

The transformation experienced by Colla and Ryberg during their St. Mary’s tenure is something current students attest to as well.
Maria Hernandez, a senior with a double-major in anthropology and Spanish, first learned about social justice through her mother. Maria’s father, a horse trainer, moved his family from the Mexico City area to Woodland, Calif., when she was young, and her mother became very involved in teaching catechism and working for social justice for migrant farmworkers.

After first working with CILSA her freshman year, Hernandez became a community Bonner Leader and worked at the LaSallian Educational Opportunities Center in west Oakland — tutoring middle school children, helping with art projects and doing some one-on-one mentoring.

In her junior year, she continued her education in Mexico, Peru and Argentina through a study-abroad program but also did volunteer service everywhere she stayed. Now back at St. Mary’s, she is a senior intern at the LEO Center, supervising other CILSA students who are fulfilling their yearlong service commitment.

Her CILSA experience has changed her life’s path. “I was already involved in social justice, but I never really realized how much a part of me it could be, that I could have a career in social justice, rather than just volunteer as kind of a hobby on the side,” Hernandez said. “Right now I am looking into doing post-graduate volunteer work in programs in Ecuador or Bolivia — or Brazil, if I can learn Portuguese.”

Brad Parry, a junior engineering student from Orange County, did some service work in high school before enrolling at St. Mary’s. As an Engaged Learning Facilitator (ELF), he is one of the student leaders who facilitates the service and learning experience of other participants and serves as a liaison among participants, faculty members and community partners.

Over the course of three years, he has both led and participated in a variety of CILSA activities, including recruitment, service opportunities and the annual Carnival 4 Kids.

As part of the Saturdays of Service commitment, he was part of a contingent that planted and tended the communal gardens for the Alameda Point Cooperative, a neighborhood developed for formerly homeless families.

“My service has transformed me into a person that wants and needs to act,” Parry said. “I not only enjoy serving, but I also feel there is a call to help others in need and to really reach solidarity in the world.

“My hope is to reach out there to those in need and provide not just material benefits, but ultimately to give them my time, my heart, and my hands.”