This is What Mission Looks Like

How does one define community? For Alison Benders, vice president for Mission and Ministry at Santa Clara University, community is about shared values. While SCU’s values are inspired by our university’s foundation as a Jesuit Catholic institution, they have grown to welcome people of all backgrounds who want to build a more humane, just, and sustainable world.

To celebrate the values that make Santa Clara such an impactful community, Benders’ office is hosting its second annual Mission Week: On Mission, In Solidarity from October 21-28.

“Mission Week is designed to make our five core values—care for the whole person, kinship and solidarity, finding God all things, faith in service of justice, and discernment—concrete for people,” explains Benders.

We spoke with Benders about some event highlights to look forward to and how these conversations about our values are inspiring change across our community.

Where did the idea of Mission Week come from?

In 2019, we conducted a mission priority examen and a self-study report as part of a regular review process sponsored by the Associate of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU). What we learned was that our community did a lot of work to embody SCU’s Jesuit, Catholic mission, but, individually, people weren’t necessarily connecting the dots between that work and SCU’s grounding purpose. To address this, the Division of Mission and Ministry was created in 2021 to champion SCU’s mission of creating people in solidarity with other people.

The first Mission Week last year was a vehicle for us to identify the key values we wanted to spotlight from the Jesuit tradition and show how they look in practice. Since then, we’ve added more partners across campus and rolled out a “This is What Mission Looks Like” campaign on the campus digital screens to highlight all the wonderful work our community does. This, we hope, is a comprehensive call to the university that our mission is important and worth celebrating.

How has the idea of “mission” evolved for you?

I’m not sure that our core mission has changed. I’d say the change has been in how we invite people to make this mission their own, especially as our community has become much less homogenous. For example, only 30% of our incoming class is Catholic, so we have to be explicit in enculturating our shared values that unite us as one community.

As a result, Mission Week is not about evangelizing a single worldview, rather it demonstrates through a variety of voices and activities how we live with one another guided by our particular purpose.

Why are Jesuit values relevant in today’s world?

It’s funny, I remember a couple of years ago, one of our staff members was leading a student discussion about SCU’s Jesuit values. One student pushed back, saying “We don’t want to talk about Jesuit values.” But when the staff member pointed out the values specifically, the students were surprised, “Oh, we do that.” Students had mistakenly thought Jesuit values were doctrinal pronouncements of the Catholic Church. In reality, SCU’s Jesuit values are very, very human and compel us to face the morally urgent issues in today’s world head-on.

How is Santa Clara’s mission different from other Jesuit schools?

While all Jesuit schools have shared traditions and values, each institution chooses what to emphasize. Some emphasize their Catholic identities much more than we do. However, Santa Clara is at a stable point in balancing its identity as a Catholic university without individual community members needing to be Catholic. Because we are Jesuit and Catholic, we welcome all people and their search for meaning.

Additionally, SCU’s location in Silicon Valley encourages us to face questions about technology, healthcare, and the environment. These are such visible, urgent issues in our region, so much so, that we can’t look away. Our values demand us to be strong community partners, prioritizing the most critical issues, whether it’s AI or public health. This sets SCU apart from other Jesuit universities and makes this education extraordinary. I believe that with our setting, the strengths of our faculty, and our multicultural and multifaith community, Santa Clara is poised to make a real difference in the decade ahead.

What can first-year students gain from participating in Mission Week?

We want students to learn SCU’s Jesuit values early because it really makes a difference in how they walk along their educational path. There’s evidence that when someone has experiences of compassion or conversations with people in situations different from their own, they enlarge their capacity for being generous and caring for others. Since our mission is about choosing to live with one another justly and compassionately, the earlier students have these experiences, the better.

There are some unique events on the Mission Week calendar—collaborations with the Ciocca Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, pedagogical development, and a walking tour of the Mission Santa Clara.

How is it meaningful to have all of these touchpoints with campus and this effort? There are two things. First, these events signal to everybody that it’s everyone’s job to build up the campus according to our mission. Second, the broad range of events shows students the many ways to interpret Jesuit values. Each campus partner will showcase the application of the values differently because of their disciplines and domains. The more partners we have, the more they will contribute to a greater understanding of what it means to be a community anchored in SCU’s values.

What events are you most excited about?

Personally, I’m excited about my “fireside chat” with Shá Duncan Smith about mission and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Shá is just so inspiring to be with—we were actually hired together two years ago so that our work in community building could be tightly linked. The university’s mission is most fundamentally about community, and you can’t be a community without making inclusion and justice your top priority. Sometimes inclusion can be interpreted as a secular or political value and people respond transactionally, like checking off some boxes. Our chat aims to shift that understanding to demonstrate, first, that inclusion is transformative and, second, that our Jesuit values demand that we seek justice in community on this campus.

I’m also excited about Professor Lee Panich’s walking tour of indigenous sites around the Mission Gardens. “Mission” as a word carries a lot of weight, both positive and negative. It’s a heavy word. By highlighting our connection to our Indigenous community and SCU as located on the traditional homeland of the Muwekma Ohlone, we acknowledge and intentionally grapple with the complexity of our mission. Professor Panich will share the history of this small parcel of land, a history that extends way beyond SCU’s 170 years. When we know what has happened here, we are motivated and better prepared to reconcile this past with the university’s commitment to being a community of justice.

Lastly, we cap off Mission Week on Friday afternoon with a really fun event showcasing the Ignatian Center’s new offices in Nobili Hall. The open house event will also include a voter registration table as another demonstration of what mission looks like.

How would you like to see Mission Week grow and evolve in future years?

What I listen for in conversations is how people express mission. If someone says, “I’m concerned about the campus mission because we need more students to attend mass,” then I know there’s work to be done. Certainly, Catholic liturgy is an important celebration of the university’s faith. However, I think a greater measure of our success is seeing people making transformative change because they’ve identified the ways their decisions can foster a community that builds a more just, humane, and sustainable world.

In future years, I would like to see more campus partners exploring our mission and showing how our mission has made their scholarship or outreach activities more meaningful. I’d also love to see community partners join in so they can feel like an extension of our campus. And, of course, it would be amazing to have more funding to meet the clear student demand for immersions, fellowships, retreats, and interreligious dialogues.

If people would like to get involved, what would you suggest?

Attend everything, learn about our mission, discuss our mission, and incorporate Jesuit values in your reflections and decisions! Our team would like to help any office on campus offer a mission event or hold a conversation at some other time in the year. We welcome any and all invitations and partnerships to talk about what mission looks like at SCU.