Service Learning

Through our service-learning trips and opportunities all students have the opportunity to grow in the area of servant leadership. We hope this will be a defining experience that will last well beyond your college years, an adventure that will challenge you in mind, body and soul, and form you in becoming a leader that inspires. Our service-learning opportunities include our annual trip to the Northwest Territories, local service opportunities at The Door is Open (a drop-in centre in Vancouver's downtown Eastside), and the Catholic Charities Men’s Hostel.

Northwest Territories Trip 2017

Join the adventure!

Expand your horizons, expand your resumé. Experience our service learning trip to the Northwest Territories, the land of the midnight sun.

Applications have closed for the 2017 trip.

Questions?

Contact Alexandria Fung at [email protected]

Service Learning Trips

Summer 2015, Northwest Territories

Summer 2015, Northwest Territories
Students and staff from Corpus Christi College travelled to the Northwest Territories for a Service Trip in summer 2015. Building upon past trips to aboriginal communities, the scope of the trip was primarily one of encounter and friendship with the Dene people. We spent time in Yellowknife (the capital) and the Fort Simpson area. Activities included participating in a cultural camp with First Nations young people, organizing games for youth, and other projects.

In collaboration with Bishop Mark Hagemoen, past president of Corpus Christi College, and current bishop of Mackenzie-Ft. Smith (the territories), our mission to the north is part of a larger vision of north-south cooperation and mutual enrichment. These trips have become an exciting part of the college’s commitment to celebrating the faith and culture of the First Nations people, of reconciliation given the tragic legacy of the residential schools in Canada, and of looking forward in hope to a future of solidarity and friendship. Students have the option of taking a fully-credited and transferable six-week course in the Spring Semester, called "Social Justice and Peace Studies (SJPS) 220: Contexts of Contemporary Aboriginal Experience." The trip counts as field experience for the course.

Summer 2014, Northwest Territories

Summer 2014, Northwest Territories
Students and staff from Corpus Christi College travelled to the Northwest Territories for a Service Trip in summer 2014. Building upon past trips to aboriginal communities, the scope of the trip was primarily one of encounter and friendship with the Dene people. We spent time in Yellowknife (the capital) and the Fort Simpson area. Activities included participating in a cultural camp with First Nations young people, organizing games for youth, and other projects.

In collaboration with Bishop Mark Hagemoen, past president of Corpus Christi College, and current bishop of Mackenzie-Ft. Smith (the territories), our mission to the north is part of a larger vision of north-south cooperation and mutual enrichment. These trips have become an exciting part of the college’s commitment to celebrating the faith and culture of the First Nations people, of reconciliation given the tragic legacy of the residential schools in Canada, and of looking forward in hope to a future of solidarity and friendship. Students have the option of taking a fully-credited and transferable six-week course in the Spring Semester, called "Social Justice and Peace Studies (SJPS) 220: Contexts of Contemporary Aboriginal Experience." The trip counts as field experience for the course.

Summer 2013, Northern Canada

Summer 2013, Northern Canada
In July 2013 a group of students had the opportunity to travel to northern British Columbia and the Yukon and do service projects with local communities, including First Nation communities and churches.

Watch a short video of highlights from the 2013 trip
Watch Now

Spring 2011, Nicaragua

Spring 2011, Nicaragua
In the spring of 2011, students taking "SJPS 101: Social Justice and Peace Studies" travelled to Nicaragua. Social Justice and Peace Studies is a three-credit, transferable course that investigates the root causes of poverty, conflict, and systemic ecological degradation. As a guiding case study, the course takes up the past, present, and future of Nicaragua, a country that continues to live out its history of colonialism, war, revolution, and economic oppression, but also of faith, poetry, music, and celebration. Students are able to travel to Nicaragua for a two-week field study that incorporates instruction, service, cultural exchange, and exposure to unfamiliar truths of poverty in the Global South.

Partnering with Project Bona Fide, Corpus Christi College aims to educate with direct experience its Social Justice and Peace Studies students in global developments in sustainable agriculture, community organization, human nutrition, fair trade, subsidiarity, solidarity, and other fundamentals of Catholic Social Teaching. Part of the education comes from students working together to raise funds not only for their own travel costs, but also to contribute to their Nicaraguan hosts, for whom international travel remains an economic impossibility. This pre-departure service helps students appreciate the great privilege they enjoy simply by virtue of their participation.

Spring 2010, Guatemala

Spring 2010, Guatemala
During Reading Week 2010, eleven members of the Corpus Christi College community traveled to the small town of Patzun, Chimaltenango, Guatemala, to work at an orphanage run by the Franciscan Sisters of Assisi. The Sisters care for more than one hundred children in a community which struggles with poverty, the effects of civil war, unemployment, and many other challenges that come with living in an area that lacks the basics in social infrastructure.

We spent the first half of our days carrying bricks, mixing cement, and digging a ditch in order to lay the foundation for a wall to replace a rickety fence that surrounds the orphanage. After work each day, we played with the 80 children living in the orphanage, sharing our affection with them, and receiving so much of theirs.

We also heard testimonies from locals about issues such as unequal land tenure, Canadian mining in Guatemala, and the aftereffects of a lengthy civil war that left over 200,000 indigenous murdered by the military. One local activist working towards land reform and fair trade was forced into exile because of violence and death threats the very day before we visited his coffee farm. His brother and family still welcomed us. We learned just how unfairly the workers who grow most coffee are treated, and made a commitment as a team to refrain from drinking coffee from those who do not support fair trade.

We returned to Vancouver with many memories and a deep new understanding of a complicated country. As a unified team of friends, we were inspired by our experiences to strive for social and economic change, not only in Latin America and the developing world, but also in our families and our communities.
—James Bodnarchuk, Guatemala team 2010

Photo by Sarah Ruggier, Summer 2014 Program in the Northwest Territories