Christmas Basket Project
Participate in this short-term volunteer opportunity in December. Assist with food and gift gathering, sorting, bagging, delivering to homebound, and helping give out baskets the day folks pick them up. Hours will be days, evenings, or weekends. Sign-up opportunities will be available in November and December.

Food Pantry Ministry
Work in our emergency assistance food pantry through various opportunities. Daytime hours, Monday through Friday. Volunteers will be contacted as needed.
Pantry Worker - fill orders on a weekly/monthly basis (1-2 hours), help keep pantry clean and orderly, sort food donations.
Homebound Food Delivery - take food orders to clients who are unable to pick them up.
Pantry Stocking Crew - assist in monthly pick-ups, deliveries, and/or shopping trips to keep our pantry stocked.

Holy Family Catholic Worker House
Prepare and serve a meal at Holy Family Catholic Worker House. A crew of SFX parishioners volunteers together the 1st Thursday of every month from 4:00 to 7:30 p.m. The crew helps prepare and serve a meal for 150—200 individuals.

Sister Parish Committee
Responsible for facilitating St. Francis Xavier's commitment to the Sister Parish Covenant with St. Martin de Porres in Belize City, Belize. Initiate and/or coordinate activities within our parish that will foster faith sharing, community building, and cultural understanding with our sister parish.

St. Francis Xavier—Visitation Social Concerns Committee
Working together to increase our commitment to Catholic social teachings. This committee plans yearly activities, which includes the annual Hunger Banquet, JustFaith, Habitat for Humanity, Christmas in October, and other events dedicated to the Church's social teachings. This is a one-year commitment, starting in August, with monthly meetings.

St. James Soup Kitchen
Serve a meal at St. James Place. A crew of SFX parishioners volunteers together the 4th Tuesday of every month from 4:00 to 6:30 p.m. Duties include set-up, serving of food, and clean-up.

Sustainability Committee
Responsible for guiding the parish to live in harmony with God's creation as inspired by Scripture and Church teaching. Provide educational opportunities to the parish through films, discussion groups, seminars and other activities that illuminate ways to lighten our footprint on the planet. Provide concrete examples and opportunities for action to reduce our impact on Earth as individuals and as a parish.

African Ancestry Ministry and Evangelization is established by the Diocese of Raleigh to foster the mission of the Roman Catholic Church, spread the Gospel, celebrate the Sacraments and form a faith community. To do this the ministry must strive to create an atmosphere in which African Americans can maintain their identity, heighten their visibility and enhance their lives as Catholics. The ministry will be concerned with nurturing those in the Faith, reconciling those fallen away from the Faith and offering a church home to the un-churched through conversion to the Catholic Faith.

Abby's House is a shelter for homeless, battered, and low income women and their children in the Worcester community. We open the shelter in the evenings, interact with the guests, and return to campus the following morning. Abby's House provides a safe, supportive environment for women in the community and Holy Cross volunteers to learn from one another. Evenings spent at the shelter are a great time to offer an ear to the stories and struggles of these women's lives.

Working for justice means working for changes in the systems, structures, institutions, and public policies that are at the root causes of poverty. The goal is to transform the existing structures to be more responsive to the poor and marginalized in our community. The Church of St. Luke is committed to action and education for justice.

This program links Creighton University organizations with families residing in local homeless shelters.

Each Advent, Gesu "plants" a Christmas tree near the east altars and invites parishioners to trim this Advent Mitten Tree. The first Sunday of Advent marks the start of our annual-sharing project for the home with gifts of warmth: new mittens, caps, scarves and gloves for homeless children and adults of several shelters for Milwaukee’s homeless and victims of domestic violence. Since 2002, we have also planted a Haiti Children’s Tree, which parishioners decorate with bars of soap, toothpaste and brushes, underwear, shoes and socks, and hair clips and ribbons for the children of St. Jude, our twin parish in Haiti.

Each year, College of the Holy Cross's Bishop Healy Multicultural Society hosts a week of events dedicated to educating the community on the effects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and to building compassion for victims and their loved ones. This is the sixth consecutive year of AIDS Compassion and Awareness Week, the largest and most important event the Society sponsors. The week's events culminate in a charity banquet which serves as an educational event and fundraiser open to the Holy Cross and Worcester communities. All proceeds will be donated to AIDS Project Worcester and the Pendulum Project. The evening includes student performances, a slide show, speakers from AIDS Project Worcester and The Pendulum Project, and a raffle.

Students devote one school day a year to direct service to the poor.

St. Rita Parish collects and delivers groceries to the pantry on the fourth weekend of each month.

ASB is a week-long undergraduate service trip during Spring Break to various underserved communities around the Eastern/Southern United States. Groups travel to areas in Kentucky, Mississippi, Maryland, New Orleans, Michigan and new this year, Charleston, WV and the Bronx, NY! In addition to these seven sites, a group will be heading to Puebla, Mexico. Activities performed at all the sites may include interior and exterior home repair, maintenance work, soup kitchen work, tutoring, and other projects in the community determined by the organizations we work with. Through personal interaction with community members, students learn a great deal about the importance of service, their fellow students, and themselves.

The shelter offers housing and childcare for unmarried women with small children.

The A.E.C. provides the Wheeling Jesuit University community an opportunity to enter more fully into the Appalachian culture, with periodic work experiences in southern West Virginia. These trips to southern West Virginia are usually over Fall, Spring, and Easter breaks. The club emphasizes the values of community, simple lifestyle, and the call for justice in a region often referred to as a domestic Third World. The Club's philosophy is in keeping with the ideals of service and concern for others, which characterize the educational philosophy of Wheeling Jesuit University.

Appalacia Service Project
Each year during Spring Break, Holy Cross students travel to Appalachia and the Gulf Coast to encounter the warmth and vitality of the people in these regions, particularly those who are economically poor or marginalized. While there, students offer their time in service to the local community in a variety of ways, such as:

• painting and home repairs
• elderly assistance
• environmental clean-up
• service in soup kitchens
• tutoring school children
• new housing construction (Katrina relief)

While students work by day, evenings are dedicated to prayerful reflection and discussion as well as attending local events in the community.

A Holy Cross tradition since 1984, the Spring Break Immersion Program began with a small group of students traveling to Kentucky. Since then, the program has grown to include sites in Virginia and West Virginia. In response to Hurricane Katrina, the program expanded again in 2006 to include New Orleans and other Gulf Coast sites. In 2009, a total of 265 students took part in the program.

The Arrupe Club was established over 15 years ago with the purpose of having students serve at the Catholic Worker Soup Kitchen. Several years ago the club started to cook meals at the Ronald McDonald house on Sunday evenings. It now serves at the Catholic Worker Soup Kitchen twice a month and Ronald McDonald House twice a month during the school year.

Currently in its 22nd year, the Arrupe Immersion Program is a faith based program responding to the call to work for peace and justice in the world. This call is central to the Christian Scriptures and to the Jesuit mission of the College of the Holy Cross. 

• The Mexico Program is currently in its 19th year. The program seeks to provide students with and experience of the reality of life in Latin America through the eyes of the poor and in light of the Gospel.

The Jamaica Program seeks to offer Holy Cross students the opportunity to encounter the poor and marginalized of Jamaica through interpersonal dialogue and service, to learn about aspects of Jamaican culture through a series of speakers and to nurture and challenge their faith.

• The Kenya Program is our semester break program. Visit the Chaplains' Office to learn about their experiences and explore possibilities of being part of the next trip.

The Arrupe Neighborhood Partnership (Arrupe), a unique service and community-based program, is central to Saint Ignatius High School's focus on developing "Men for Others."  We offer students and their parents an opportunity to become involved, serve others, build friendships, strengthen their faith, and ultimately to make a difference in the lives of neighborhood children and families in need.  Arrupe sponsors a variety of afterschool service programs and events throughout the school year and summer.

Each senior is placed in a school, hospital, child care center, elderly care center or special service program that will allow them to practice what they have been taught

The club prepares fund-raisers and bi-monthly trips to DC soup kitchens

Baby Corner attends to the physical needs of infants and young children in poverty. The parish community is encouraged to bring formula, food, and basic baby supplies throughout the year to the crib in the sanctuary.