For a quarter of a century, the Ignatian Volunteer Corps has brought people over 50 together for spiritual growth and to help others in the Chicago area.
Volunteers work with 40 partner organizations, doing everything from tutoring to administrative tasks to jail ministry. When they join the corps, volunteers agree to spend up to two days a week for a year volunteering in an organization selected to match their skills. They also connect with individual spiritual reflectors and attend meetings and retreats.
Partner organizations get volunteers with professional and life skills who can be counted on to keep their commitments. They also bring an attitude of service, according to partner organizations.
The volunteers have been a godsend at Cristo Rey St. Martin College Prep in Waukegan, a Cristo Rey-model school in which students work one day a week in a professional environment, both to gain experience and to offset the cost of tuition.
Cristo Rey St. Martin President Preston Kendall said he asked for IVC volunteers as soon as he learned they were available.
“I was looking for ways to get more help in a way that would be helpful for the school when we didn’t have two nickels to rub together,” Kendall said. “Being able to find people with professional experience that were able to help coach our students and engage with them in a one-to-one encounter was so important to our students, to bridge this gap from being a teenager with little worldly experience to going into a professional environment with adults and be comfortable.”
Among the current volunteers at Cristo Rey St. Martin is Mari-Lou Menezes, once a national leader at J.P. Morgan, now part of the school’s corporate work-study team. She receives reports from students about their work experiences. She grades and corrects the written work and identifies students who need more mentoring.
“It’s been a really illuminating experience,” Menezes said. “You get off your high horse. You think you’re going to share your knowledge with them, but it’s about learning about who these students are as people and what makes them tick.”
Part of her work is encouraging students, many of whom are immigrants or children of immigrants, to dream big, she said, as her parents encouraged her. Menezes’ parents immigrated from India, and she and her sister were the first generation in their family to go to college.
Menezes read about IVC in a Jesuit newsletter after she retired, she said.
“I had just come to the conclusion that I wanted to do something with my time,” she said. “I was feeling a little bereft. Even though I prayed, I wanted a deeper connection with God and I didn’t know how to find it. Going to church, saying my prayers, had become somewhat routine.”
She found that, as well as more social connections, said Menezes, a parishioner at St. Norbert and Our Lady of the Brook in Northbrook.
Kendall said IVC’s focus on faith is a good fit for his Catholic high school.
“We’re a faith-based school,” he said. “To be able access IVC volunteers who are similarly focuses and aligned is wonderful. Having people who are from different walks of life interact with students and talk about their faith is a blessing for us.”
While Menezes felt an immediate connection to the community at Cristo Rey St. Martin, Tom Marthaler, who retired from a career in finance, did not initially want to serve at Cook County Jail, where he now volunteers with the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation.
Marthaler, a parishioner at St. Francis Xavier in La Grange, said he checked out IVC before he retired in 2019, and met with the director after his retirement.
“‘When people retire, people kind of do one of two things,” he said. “They find something that allows them to use professional skills, or they go in a different direction. For me, jail ministry was near the bottom of the list.”
With PBMR, most of his time is spent ministering to people in the jail, and his view of jail ministry has turned 180 degrees.
“Before I did it, it was overwhelming and it’s an experience where I was afraid,” Marthaler said. “Once I got inside and actually sat down with the people I was meeting with, it was just like meeting with anyone you were meeting for the first time.
Precious Blood Father David Kelly, executive director of PBMR, said what the IVC jail ministers bring most to inmates is a sense of connection.
“The only thing you can bring is yourself and your relationship and your presence,” Kelly said.
For Kelly, the IVC volunteers are similar to the men and women religious who work with the Ministry of Reconciliation because of their approach to ministry.
“They see this work as not just work to be done, but as part of a spiritual journey that they are on,” he said. “That’s where we are. It’s part of our spiritual journey.”
That also helps them handle the setbacks that can arise when working with people who have a lot of trauma in their backgrounds, Kelly said. Those setbacks can be frustrating, especially for people who are focused on productivity.
“But when you base the ministry on spirituality, your work is not just about productivity and what you can get done, but rather that relationship you have with that individual,” Kelly said. “It allows people to be in those spaces for much longer with much less frustration.”
Nicole Coomer, executive director of Center of Concern, a Des Plaines-based social service agency that mostly serves seniors, agreed that IVC’s mission makes it a good fit for her organization.
“There’s such a wonderful mission alignment between the IVC and the center,” Coomer said. “Empowerment, dignity, serving those most in need. We both benefit and grow from the experience.”
Marilyn Russo is one of several IVC volunteers at Center of Concern. It’s her second volunteer position; the retired fifth-grade teacher from St. Catherine Laboure School in Glenview also volunteered with refugee students at Sullivan High School in Chicago for a few years.
Now she is the first person people visiting Center of Concern encounter when they come to the office or call. Russo connects them to the person they need to see or the office they need to speak with.
“My job is just to be welcoming and respectful,” Russo said. “Besides the clients, it helps the staff. I try to get people to the right place.”
Like other volunteers, Russo was looking for community and a way to help.
“My family needed me, but I wanted to do something outside of that,” she said. “You read in the paper and you see on the news that there is a need, but [when you volunteer] you really see that there is a huge need, for housing or helping seniors. It’s kind of heartbreaking. For me, it’s a whole new place for me to be. All the people at Center of Concern are so great; they are so caring.”
For more information on Ignatian Volunteer Corps, visit ivcusa.org/ivc-offices/Chicago.