Pedro Arrupe Volunteers

PAV is a multifaith and interfaith student-led community with the mission to accompany our Bronx and greater NYC area neighbors in prayer, service, solidarity, and reflection.

Our community welcomes you to join us as we engage with the struggle for justice with our neighbors through a variety of service opportunities. Our ultimate goal is community engagement; nurturing and sustaining relationships between the Fordham community and our neighbors in the Bronx and NYC.

There are two main components of the Pedro Arrupe Volunteers - direct service and engagement with our neighbors and community partners and educating for a faith that does justice through our Common Grounds Conversations. 

“Through our service programs we can learn more about ourselves and how we relate or do not relate to others, about our fears and biases, about our hidden strengths and unexpected tenderness...we help, not as superior to other persons, but as brothers or sisters. It is graceful to take time to see; it Is even more graceful to take time to let our hearts be touched, to enter into the world of another person."

We provide opportunities for short term engagement with our community through direct service and exploration of current issues through our Conversations speaker and discussion series.  During the Covid 19 crisis, we developed remote service opportunities in deference to the needs of our community partners and some of those programs continue to need remote volunteers.

We work with churches and other organizations in our Bronx and Lincoln Center communities, and some of our current projects and partners include:

• Soup kitchens- Creston Avenue Baptist Church, POTS, St. Paul the Apostle Church, Xavier Mission
• Midnight Run- toiletry and meal preparation and distribution for people experiencing homelessness in Manhattan
• Habitat for Humanity NYC, Fuller Center Neighborhood Restoration
• Immigration class and document translation with Mexican Coalition
• Health and Resource Screening and Information fairs at Bronx churches
• Early literacy days for school-age children at Belmont Library
• Remote reading program Reading Buddies with StriveHigher
• Park restoration with Bronx is Blooming and others
• Supporting University Neighborhood Housing Program tax prep and housing lottery. 
• Engaging with children at Concourse House
• Engaging with retired Jesuits at Murray Weigel Hall

The level of commitment ranges from participating in one or more projects to joining the Pedro Arrupe Leadership Council and helping to determine and lead our projects.

We value the relationships we have made with our community. If you commit to volunteering on a particular day, we trust that you’ll be there. Please let us know as soon as possible if you will no longer be able to attend a project.

We build community with fellow project volunteers and our neighbors in the Bronx and Manhattan by immersing ourselves in service opportunities, prayer, reflection, and discussions during our Common Grounds Conversation speaker series. 

We challenge volunteers to lean into discomfort--we encourage open minds in order to best feed their souls!
 

We are present in our own faith backgrounds, with an openness to meet our neighbors wherever they are. We seek to share in meaningful experience with all those we encounter and to acknowledge our shared human dignity.

Reflection and prayer are about journeying through life with some guides and maps; about letting God find a home in us. But prayer and reflection are also about our pain, our losses, and our failures...the human heart can soar but it can also break. Sometimes, too, prayer and reflection can lead us to outrage at the evil people inflict on one another—like racism, sexism, economic tyranny, and political oppression.  It can lead us to mourn or protest the contradiction between God's design and the kind of world in which we currently live.

On service programs, the idea of reflection is to bring the lived experience of the day into dialogue with something larger than the self. Reflection is the human ability to search for meaning in all life's events. Prayer is that same human reflection but done in the company of God.  

Prayer is an opportunity to disengage from the action of service and connect with the people we encounter.  We encourage you to reflect on your experiences allowing intentional thought as you are present in service.

We are people of many different faiths, in service with others.
 

"To be just, is not enough to refrain from injustice. One must go further and refuse to play its game, substituting love for self interest as the driving force of society." - Fr. Pedro Arrupe, S.J.

Pedro Arrupe, S.J., served as Superior General of the Society of Jesus from 1965 to 1983. He is remembered for his commitment to social justice and serving the needs of the poor. Our community emulates Fr. Arrupe's example of love for "the least of our neighbors" and his call to "proclaim the Gospel" that demands of us "a commitment to promote justice and enter into solidarity with the voiceless and the powerless."

During his time with the Jesuits, Fr. Arrupe was especially supportive of those who worked with the poor and marginalized in Central and South America. Fr. Arrupe was also a a great advocate for liberation theology which he taught as the suffering endured by the victims of war and poverty with Christ’s compassion and that alleviating the one through justice was honoring the other in faith. He was described by many as “a second Ignatius” and practiced Zen meditation daily as well as social justice advocacy.  

It is Fr. Arrupe's words that encourage us to become "Men and Women for others".

As our community partners continue to adapt their programming as a result of Covid 19, we have developed in person, on campus and remote projects in deference to the needs of our community partners. Projects are opened about a month in advance and volunteers can sign up for whichever projects they choose and can fully commit to as our partners rely on our volunteers. To advance a faith that does justice, PAV will promote encounters and conversations that challenge the reduction of persons to abstractions where “there are no citizens, only votes; no poor, only thresholds of poverty; no migrants, only quotas; no workers, only economic markers” (Pope Francis) through our Common Grounds Conversation series.