Former full-time volunteers confess that their experiences change them for good.

"This feels like a homecoming," Beth Knobbe told a retreat group of both new and familiar faces-30 of her fellow alumni from Amate House, a Catholic lay volunteer program in Chicago. Knobbe actually lived with just a few of the retreatants when they were part of the program. Most of the alumni on the retreat were more recent Amate graduates, including eight who had just completed their service year in 2006, 10 years after Knobbe had finished hers. Still, Knobbe immediately felt connected to these young adults, who knew what the full-time volunteer experience was all about.

"All of us can admit that an experience like Amate changes us," Knobbe said. "We use that wonderful phrase ‘ruined for life,' which is to say, ‘you will never be the same.'"

For Knobbe, being "ruined for life" meant that after working for a corporation for seven years, she found herself "giving in to God's deep desire for my life." She earned her master of divinity degree at Catholic Theological Union and became a campus minister at Northwestern University. Being "ruined," however, isn't just about one's career. "It's a way of life, a way of being with others, and a way of being with God," Knobbe said. "Service is more than something to cross off our to-do lists. It isn't something we do; it's who we are."

The 30 Amate alumni at this retreat are just a few of tens of thousands of alumni from numerous Catholic service programs in the United States and abroad. These programs allow young adults, generally right out of college, to work with the poor without pay while living in a supportive faith-based community for a year or two. Though each program is unique, four common tenets often shape the volunteer experience: social justice, community, simple living, and faith. These tenets also become values former volunteers live by for the rest of their lives.


Working for justice
Nikki Rohling planned to pursue a career in public relations for chemical companies after graduating from the University of Dayton in Ohio. After a year teaching preschool through the Colorado Vincentian Volunteers, she knew that neither public relations nor teaching were for her. Instead she took a job at the Catholic Network of Volunteer Services. "I never thought that volunteering would lead to a full-time job," Rohling says. Now the associate director of CNVS, she helps 5,000 people a year have similar life-changing experiences.

"Volunteering is a really good professional stepping-stone," Rohling says. "A lot of times people say it's taking a year off, but as far as professional experience, you gain a lot."

Half of her 12 roommates, Rohling says, stayed on at their volunteer jobs. According to a study of Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) alumni, 48 percent of former volunteers-compared to 28 percent of all college graduates-work for non-profits and the government (including education), and their top three professions are teaching, health care, and social services. Moreover, 72 percent of former Jesuit volunteers say that social justice is important to their career.

Interacting with the poor also affects how someone lives out his or her concern for social justice. Jennifer Griffin, who majored in Latin American and urban studies at Fordham University, for instance, thought she wanted to help people by planning neighborhoods. After two years of reflecting on her future and working with teenage mothers as a Good Shepherd volunteer in Lima, Peru, however, "I really realized that God gave me gifts to work directly with people rather than working with neighborhoods," she says. "God was calling me to work with people emotionally and spiritually." This fall she will start a master's program in social work.

After direct service, volunteers tend to have a bias against business-a sense that "business is evil, [and] I can't go into it," notes Brendan Comito, who volunteered with JVC from 1989 to 1990 and is the third generation of his family to run Capital City Fruit in Des Moines, Iowa. "I think the business world would be better off if more volunteers would go into business."

Comito's JVC experience especially influences his work when he has to lay off underperforming employees. He's seen how losing a job can affect someone's life, but he also knows that he has to protect 100 other jobs. "I try to look at what we have to do for the common good of the business," Comito says. "It's an everyday struggle."

Running a non-profit, Matthew Nespoli finds, allows him to "apply my love of business and economics to a social justice issue." After visiting Waslala, Nicaragua while at Villanova University, he became an economics major to understand poverty. He wrote a business plan for Water for Waslala, which helps develop potable water systems in the region, and the Augustinian Volunteers allowed him to start his non-profit as a volunteer in 2004.

Direct service wouldn't have attracted Nespoli to volunteering, he says, but since then he's found that researching poverty at the Federal Reserve Board is too indirect for him. This summer he is moving to New York City to work for a consulting firm that helps manage infrastructure programs. He also runs Water for Waslala on the side with the help of current Augustinian volunteers.


Support system
At first Nespoli's parents weren't keen on his plans. His business-oriented parents wanted him to "get a high-paying job, have a big family, live in the suburbs, and be a good Italian Catholic," he says.

Once they saw that he was adding a unique experience to his resume, however, they became the biggest supporters of Water for Waslala and of the volunteer experience. "It's cool to see my parents' transition. They've become much more socially conscious," Nespoli says. "I've been able to convince them that a career for others is a good thing, but it's been a very slow process."

Volunteering means "not having a job, not having a career, not starting off a grad program right away. These are all expectations on [college students]," says Melissa Florer-Bixler, who lived and assisted people with disabilities in a L'Arche community before becoming the assistant director of Portland University's volunteer services.

Florer-Bixler's experience at L'Arche also "planted a seed" within her family-her sister lives in a L'Arche community and her father has done psychological evaluations for L'Arche. She even married a fellow L'Arche assistant and they plan to move back into their L'Arche community soon. Their relationship, she says, was "not so much focused on him and me that we lost perspective on the needs of our world around us."

"It's kind of a common story among volunteers," says Effie Caldarola, who married a fellow Jesuit volunteer. Effie and her husband, Jim, volunteered in Yukon, Alaska from 1974 to 1977. "We were thrust into community," Effie says. "You lived in an isolated space. There weren't a lot of options for recreation."

The Caldarolas have raised three children while working for the church in Anchorage, Alaska, where they live within walking distance of two other JVC families. Their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, says her childhood was different from her friends'. When she was young, it was just little things like not having cable television or video games, but as she got older, she realized they spent more time together as a family, volunteering and worshiping with the people they served. The family's idea of church, Effie says, is a small faith-based community. "Our children really grew up hoping for a Vatican II church and a church where people worked for social justice," Effie says. "Sometimes that's been hard because I think our children expected more than the church was able to give in terms of change."

Her children, Effie says, weren't always grateful for their simple lifestyle. "Why don't we have a bigger TV? Why don't we have a bigger house?" she says they occasionally asked.

But the values did sink in for Elizabeth. She can't remember making a conscious decision to follow in her parents' footsteps, but in 2004 she volunteered with JVC in Philadelphia. "It was almost like an expectation-not that my parents were overtly placing on me-but I really appreciate the way that they brought us up. I naturally wanted that for myself," she says.