CCSC - One Year Later
By Mark Ciemcioch - Staff Reporter
The people who volunteer to spend a year working with the Diocesan Service Corps expected to have a life changing experience. It seems it's changed their lives even more than they realized.
Now in its second year, the CCSC offers its volunteers the opportunity to live in a community setting with others for a year while they work at social outreach programs for very little money. It's living on the margin to help those who slid off the path some time ago and have largely been forgotten or ignored by society.
One of the main goals of the CCSC is for volunteers to discover that faith and belief in a core set of religious values isn't just something they do once a week for an hour. It's a way of life that influences, to some degree, every thought they have.
"Many of them come in with this belief that they're coming to do good for a year, and certainly that happens, but many of them are surprised about how fully they serve and are served by the poor," said Amy Fleischauer, director of the CCSC. "Their strongest connection with God doesn't happen during Church; it happens when they're doing outreach in an alley."
The CCSC is offered to young men and women who recently graduated from college but still have time before they settle into their adult life. What they provide is a year of service to the community creating something from the margin, as Fleischauer said and work in outreach and charity programs. What separates the CCSC from other service groups is a spirituality component that allows the volunteers to discuss and reflect, by themselves and with each other, about their experiences. While not everybody in the group is Catholic, they all pray together at least once a week, and attend services in their particular denomination. Some even work together in Bible study sessions.
"(The CCSC) has broadened their understanding of God, to see how God is working in each of their lives in such different ways," she said. "Working with clients who are homeless, abused and stuck in systems that we, the privileged, contribute to, really challenges your belief that God's showing up. (To) have a place where you can get angry and get excited, and talk about the experiences of seeing God in the face of the poor is a huge surprise for many of them. The most important faith component here is that they're living in a community where it's safe to have those conversations."
With the program well into its second year, Fleischauer said she still remains in contact with the first year's volunteers and noted how much their lives have changed after their service. Three of the four volunteers stayed in Buffalo, with careers as a math teacher in the city and youth ministry. Another has enrolled in divinity school. The one volunteer who didn't stay in Buffalo moved to Philadelphia to spend another year of service with the Jesuit Volunteers, where he works in a welfare reform program.
Fleischauer complimented the courage of the volunteers to leave their native areas and enter a foreign environment to serve a higher purpose.
"It's a huge commitment," she said. "You're moving to a city (where) you've never been, to work at a job you have no experience at, to live in a community (with people) you've never met, and you have no money. It takes a lot of courage and faith to trust that God's going to support you through that."
Despite the difficulties the volunteers face, with themselves and the people they encounter, Fleischauer believes that God's Will is in them.
"The greatest part of it is, I'm continually awed by how God works in these young people's lives," she said. "It seems so random at the onset, (but) you can see throughout the year why they were brought here."
Western New York Catholic - May 2004