Jesuits Find Many Students Willing to Devote Year of Service to Needy : Volunteers: Recruitment at college campuses has risen steadily in last four years. Workers seize the opportunity to ‘give something back.’

Jeff Strickland was a student at Loyola Marymount College in Los Angeles when he heard about a volunteer program that changed the course of his life.

The sociology major joined a Jesuit volunteer corps in 1989 and was sent to Philadelphia, where he taught for a year at an inner-city school. Three years later, he is still there, teaching eighth-grade science.

“I think most people view it as a ‘60s kind of thing,” Strickland said, recalling the reactions of his family and friends when he joined the South of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. “But for me, it was a real conscious decision” and also helped him reassess his Catholic identity.

Jesuit volunteer programs are attracting a growing number of recruits willing to give up a year of their lives to help the poor and needy.

“It may be a reaction from the ‘80s, which was a real ‘go out and make something of yourself’ decade,” said Kevin O’Brien of Houston, director of the South of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. “I think there’s a backlash from that.”

O’Brien, who was a volunteer with the corps in 1981, reported that his region placed 61 volunteers during the past year. “That’s the largest group we’ve ever had,” he said.

O’Brien’s excitement was echoed by spokespersons in the corps’ four other regions. Overall, the five regions have reported steady increases for at least the last four years and have a record number of 425 volunteers placed throughout the country.

The 35-year-old program recruits volunteers actively on the campuses of the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States and other Catholic schools. Although it requires applicants to fill out forms similar to those for a college entrance application, Kathleen Haser, director of the Philadelphia office, reported that “it’s not a hard sell.”

The program has four elements--community living, spirituality, social justice and simple life style. “We look for people who are motivated by their faith,” Haser said, noting that in some cases the year of voluntary service helps participants to strengthen their faith or to re-examine what their religious beliefs mean in a practical, everyday way.

Strickland, 24, heard about the corps from a campus recruiter and a friend who volunteered for the international counterpart of the domestic corps, the Jesuit International Volunteer Corps.

Strickland said he had been attracted to the program because “I didn’t want the rat race, qualifying for jobs that I didn’t really care about.”

He was accepted into the program in 1989 and moved to Philadelphia, where he spent a year as a gym coach and teaching assistant at the all-black inner-city St. Malachy’s School.

“It kind of got my feet wet in teaching,” said Strickland, who decided to stay on at the school after his yearlong commitment as a volunteer ended.

His experience with the Jesuit program also helped him reassess his Catholic identity. “I was starting to become very disillusioned with the Catholic Church and with religion in general,” he said. But through working in the program, he said, “I learned to see Christ in everyday things, in everyday experiences, in the people I was working with.”

Today, Strickland said, “I still tend to de-emphasize the actual church, where I find a lot of problems, and try to focus on Christ’s message and Christ himself.”

When Patrick Grace, 23, first heard of the program as a student at Marquette University in Milwaukee last spring, he was attracted because “all my life I’ve been given so much. I wanted to give something back.”

So the young man from an affluent Cleveland suburb found himself living in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn this fall--an area marked last summer by sometimes violent clashes between blacks and Hasidic Jews--working with a Catholic Charities program to help new residents of a federally financed low-income project for senior citizens in Queens.

Living and working in low-income neighborhoods in New York City “has been a huge change,” Grace said. “You read about it in the papers, but it’s different when you experience it.”

His experiences in the program have helped him to “appreciate the little things, and how fallible I really am,” he said.

Grace said he particularly appreciates the community-living aspect of the program. At the end of each workday, he and four other volunteers with whom he lives share notes and compare experiences.

While each volunteer has a unique story to tell, common threads run through them. “There’s such a need for informed, committed lay persons,” said O’Brien.

Carlos Perez, 27, was a student at Rice University in Houston when he learned about the volunteer corps through the off-campus Catholic Student Center.

“I had been thinking about doing volunteer work for a while,” he said. “The Jesuits’ name for me gave the program a certain respectability.”

Perez works as a volunteer with refugee children from Central America who are facing deportation proceedings and are seeking legal means of remaining in the United States--where they have no relatives to help them.

For Perez, who plans to work toward a doctorate in religion and teach theology, the work is a training ground for that. He describes it as “a great experience to live out your spirituality in the face of difficult circumstances.”

Not all of the volunteers are in their 20s. At 35, Julieta Torres is a little different from the “typical” volunteer who enters the program fresh out of college. The native of Torreon, Mexico, did not earn a college degree but graduated from a Jesuit high school and began teaching English at a Jesuit school in Torreon.

Today, she is volunteering her services at St. Luke’s Parish in Woodburn, Ore. Among other things, she prints the Spanish-language version of the parish bulletin each week and teaches Spanish in the parish elementary school, the pre-confirmation parish classes, and a Sunday school class.

For Torres, the program has helped her to “find God in people” and to equate faith with “doing things with people.”