Santa Clara University
ER-12: Sustainability Immersive Experience

There are a number of immersive experience opportunities offered at Santa Clara that incorporate components of Sustainability, specifically social and environmental justice. The following paragraphs provide a comprehensive description of a portion of these programs that are offered through SCU's Ignatian Center. Honoring the former Superior General of the Society of Jesus, the Peter Hans Kolvenbach, S.J. Solidarity Program offers students extended immersion experiences into the gritty reality of our globalizing world. By learning directly with and from communities, we seek to realize the Jesuit Higher Education Mission – restated and renewed by Father Kolvenbach at the 2000 Justice Conference – of forming women and men of well-educated solidarity. Following Father Kolvenbach’s lead, we strive to empower our participants to let the reality of this world into their lives, so they can learn to feel it, think about it critically, respond to its suffering, and engage it constructively. These immersion experiences, and the profound reflection to which they naturally give rise, are privileged moments of vocational discernment during which participants are uniquely invited to consider their place in the world. The goals of the Kolvenbach Solidarity Program are: - To provide students with moments of direct contact with the materially poor and/or marginalized. - To empower students to see the world with new eyes -- to recognize their privileged position as well as their fundamental connection to those who experience injustice and suffering. - To inform and further students' vocational discernment. - To unmask the cultural and commercial messages that prevent us from experiencing true compassion and solidarity and which keep us separated from others. - To connect with and understand viscerally the experience of profound deprivation and marginalization common to our ancestors and to the majority of the world's population. These experiences are so foreign to us today that we are estranged from 90% of the world's population. The Kolvenbach Solidarity Program thus seeks to break down the gates between our community of privilege and the reality of our world. In 2009-2010 there were approximately 325 students that participated in immersion experiences offered throughout the year-during summer, Thanksgiving, winter and spring recesses. The Kolvenbach Solidarity Program directly coordinated 12 immersion trips and collaborated with other campus departments to support an additional 5 trips. Annually there are approximately 325 students that participate in immersion experiences with trusted community partners in: El Salvador, Ecuador, Mexico, New Orleans, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Appalachia, Navajo Nation, and Nogales. These trips are offered throughout the year—during the summer as well as Thanksgiving, winter, and spring recesses. Weekend Urban Plunge experiences into neighborhoods of San Jose and San Francisco are offered on multiple occasions throughout the academic year.