Santa Clara University

Santa Clara University alumni have recently embarked on a year of full-time volunteer service with Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) Northwest.  These four graduates are part of the 123 total Northwest Jesuit Volunteers (JVs) who began their service in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon or Washington last month.

Their year kicked off with a weeklong orientation at Camp Adams in Molalla, Ore., and will continue through August 2010. 

“We’re excited these committed women and men are offering a year of their lives in service and working for the transformation of our world,” says Jeanne Haster, executive director for JVC Northwest. 

The 54-year-old program supports volunteers living in community in 19 locations across the Northwest. Volunteers live in urban and rural locations in houses that each support four to eight volunteers. The current JVs work in many areas, including advocating for refugees, nursing in community clinics, teaching in schools on Native American Reservations, assisting in shelters, and organizing a local response to climate change.  JVs are also immersed in the four core values of JVC throughout their service year - social justice, simple living, spirituality, and community. 

This year’s Northwest JVs from Santa Clara University include:

• Laura Brown (2008), L'Arche, Seattle, Wash.
• Emily Fette (2008), American Red Cross, Anchorage, Alaska
• Julia Hopkins-Powers (2009), Paschal Sherman Indian School, Omak, Wash.
• Leslie Kincaid (2009), Sisters of the Road Café, Portland, Ore.

About Santa Clara University
Santa Clara University, a comprehensive Jesuit, Catholic university located 40 miles south of San Francisco in California’s Silicon Valley, offers its 8,758 students rigorous undergraduate curricula in arts and sciences, business, and engineering, plus masters and law degrees, and engineering Ph.D.s. Distinguished nationally by one of the highest graduation rates among all U.S. masters universities, California’s oldest operating higher-education institution demonstrates faith-inspired values of ethics and social justice. For more information, see www.scu.edu.

About JVC Northwest
Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) Northwest is a nonprofit volunteer organization that recruits, places and supports men and women who are looking to live out the values of community, social justice, simple living, and spirituality.  Volunteers serve in a wide variety of service placements in Alaska, Montana, Oregon and Washington.  JVC Northwest was the birthplace of the JVC program, which has spread throughout the world, when it was established in Copper Valley, Alaska, in 1956.  The organization works to place more than 100 volunteers each year to help address economic, cultural, educational, environmental and health care needs in this region.  For more information, visit www.jvcnorthwest.org.

Deepa Arora
SCU Media Relations
408-554-5125
darora@scu.edu

Katie O'Neill
Interim Recruitment and Alumni Coordinator
Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) Northwest
P.O. Box 3928
Portland, OR 97208
p. 503.335.8202