Twenty St. Joseph’s College students will spend spring break in Kure Beach, North Carolina, helping people whose homes were damaged by Hurricane Florence in September.
“Alternative Spring Break brings hope — not only for the people we help, but for the future. That we can be better,” SJC Long Island sophomore Carly Credidio said of the annual week-long service trip involving students traveling across the United States to help communities and people in need.
St. Joseph’s students — 10 each from SJC Long Island and SJC Brooklyn — will visit Kure Beach March 17–22.
The students will be accompanied by SJC Long Island’s Director of Campus Ministry Cristian Murphy ’14 and SJC Brooklyn’s Coordinator of Community Service Michele Corsetti. They will work with Community Collaborations, a nonprofit organization that provides supervision and training for students on service trips.
Strength of Service
“The relationships I’ve seen and I’ve formed from these trips are the strongest in my life,” said Murphy, who attended a number of alternative spring and winter break trips as an SJC Long Island student. “That’s because they’re grounded in something greater than anything else, and that’s service for others.”
Credidio, who traveled to Houston, Texas, in 2018 for Alternative Spring Break and to Camden, New Jersey, last month during Alternative Winter Break, understands the healing power of service is twofold.
“Being part of these trips brings together students with the same mission and goals. And it brings a sense of community,” she said. “These trips help people. But these people change us.”
Getting to Kure
Students interested in being a part of Alternative Spring Break applied and wrote essays. They answered such questions as “Why is community service important to society and to you personally?” The students picked to attend have started fundraising efforts to help offset the trip’s cost. Through March 7, SJC Brooklyn students are selling “scratch offs” for a 50/50 raffle. In March, SJC Long Island students will raffle off gift baskets they created.
“These trips are more than a choice. They are opportunities and a calling to be a small piece of a big change we want to see in the world,” Credidio said. “Alone we can do so little, but together we can do so much.”
For more information on the SJC Brooklyn 50/50 raffle, contact Michele Corsetti at mcorsetti@sjny.edu, or stop by the Student Life Suite. For more information on the SJC Long Island raffle, contact Cristian Murphy at cmurphy3@sjny.edu.
