Pedro Arrupe Volunteers

Students standing together around a table assembling backpacks to donate.

PAV Backpack Prep

Students gather together with PAV to prepare backpacks to donate to kids in the Bronx.

Students standing in a circle in a park with grass waiting to help clean up the park.

PAV Bronx is Blooming

Students gather at Mosholu park in the Bronx to participate in a Bronx is Blooming service project cleaning up the park.

Two students standing around a table smiling with masks on with crafts on the table.

PAV Latinx Literacy Day

Students volunteering with StriveHigher at a Latinx Literacy Day at the Belmont library in the Bronx.

Students posing for group picture with two rows of students and a table with grocery bags on them preparing for a service project.

PAV Midnight Run

Students volunteer to assemble toiletry bags for a Midnight Run service project in Manhattan.

PAV Easter Basket wrapping

Students volunteer to create Easter Baskets for migrant children living with Abbott House

PAV Trick or Treat Halloween Party

Fordham University Students throw a Halloween Party for children in the community through Strive Higher

PAV Kayak and Ignatian Reflection

Fordham students kayaked along the Hudson River next to the Manhattan Community Boathouse and reflected on the topic of water conservation

 

Put your faith into action by volunteering in our community!

 

There are two main components of the Pedro Arrupe Volunteers - direct service and engagement with our neighbors and community partners and educating for a faith that does justice through our Common Grounds Conversations speaker series. Learn more about the impact of Covid-19 on marginalized populations, racism, humane migration, mass incarceration, access inequality and environmental justice issues. 

 

  • PAV is a multi-faith and interfaith, student-led community with the mission to accompany our Bronx and greater NYC area neighbors in prayer, service, solidarity, and reflection.

    Our community welcomes you to join us as we engage in the struggle for justice with our neighbors through a variety of service opportunities. Our ultimate goal is community engagement; nurturing and sustaining relationships between the Fordham community and our neighbors in the Bronx and NYC.

    There are two main components of the Pedro Arrupe Volunteers - direct service and engagement with our neighbors and community partners as well as educating for a faith that does justice through our Common Grounds Conversations. 

    Through our service programs we can learn more about ourselves and how we relate or do not relate to others, about our fears and biases, about our hidden strengths and unexpected tenderness...we help, not as superior to other persons, but as brothers or sisters. It is graceful to take time to see; it is even more graceful to take time to let our hearts be touched, to enter into the world of another person.

  • We provide opportunities for short term engagement with our community through direct service and exploration of current issues through our Conversations speaker and discussion series.  During the Covid-19 crisis, we developed remote service opportunities in deference to the needs of our community partners and some of those programs continue to need remote volunteers.

    We work with churches and other organizations in our Bronx and Lincoln Center communities, and some of our current projects and partners include:

    The level of commitment ranges from participating in one or more projects to joining the Pedro Arrupe Leadership Council and helping to determine and lead our projects.

    We value the relationships we have made with our community. If you commit to volunteering on a particular day, we trust that you’ll be there. Please let us know as soon as possible if you will no longer be able to attend a project.

  • We build community with fellow project volunteers and our neighbors in the Bronx and Manhattan by immersing ourselves in service opportunities, prayer, reflection, and dialogue. Our volunteers are challenged to lean into discomfort--we encourage open minds in order to best feed their souls!

     

    Common Grounds Conversations is a student-led speaker series focused on engaging the Fordham community with topics that explore faith, hope, love, passion, meaning and social justice.  It seeks to provide interesting conversation and dialogue for students who are seeking to learn more about how faith applies to real life questions.

    We will meet and discuss timely topics including faithful citizenship and the election, as well as exploring the issues that affect our community and marginalized populations including, racism, humane migration, mass incarceration, access inequality and environmental justice issues.

     

    By listening to a speaker's experience, we aim to break down barriers and provide opportunities for meaning engagement.

  • We are present in our own faith backgrounds, with an openness to meet our neighbors wherever they are. We seek to share in meaningful experience with all those we encounter and to acknowledge our shared human dignity.

    Reflection and prayer are about journeying through life with some guides and maps; about letting God find a home in us. But prayer and reflection are also about our pain, our losses, and our failures...the human heart can soar but it can also break. Sometimes, too, prayer and reflection can lead us to outrage at the evil people inflict on one another—like racism, sexism, economic tyranny, and political oppression.  It can lead us to mourn or protest the contradiction between God's design and the kind of world in which we currently live.

    On service programs, the idea of reflection is to bring the lived experience of the day into dialogue with something larger than the self. Reflection is the human ability to search for meaning in all life's events. Prayer is that same human reflection but done in the company of God.  

    Prayer is an opportunity to disengage from the action of service and connect with the people we encounter.  We encourage you to reflect on your experiences allowing intentional thought as you are present in service.

    We are people of many different faiths, in service with others.
     

  • "To be just, is not enough to refrain from injustice. One must go further and refuse to play its game, substituting love for self interest as the driving force of society." - Fr. Pedro Arrupe, S.J.

    Pedro Arrupe, S.J., served as Superior General of the Society of Jesus from 1965 to 1983. He is remembered for his commitment to social justice and serving the needs of the poor. Our community emulates Fr. Arrupe's example of love for "the least of our neighbors" and his call to "proclaim the Gospel" that demands of us "a commitment to promote justice and enter into solidarity with the voiceless and the powerless."

    During his time with the Jesuits, Fr. Arrupe was especially supportive of those who worked with the poor and marginalized in Central and South America. Fr. Arrupe was also a a great advocate for liberation theology which he taught as the suffering endured by the victims of war and poverty with Christ’s compassion and that alleviating the one through justice was honoring the other in faith. He was described by many as “a second Ignatius” and practiced Zen meditation daily as well as social justice advocacy.  

    It is Fr. Arrupe's words that encourage us to become "Men and Women for others".

  • We dialogue with community partners to find areas of common interest with the potential for collaboration and the development of joint projects. Projects are opened about a month in advance and volunteers can sign up for whichever projects they choose and can fully commit to, as our partners rely on our volunteers.

    To advance a faith that does justice, PAV will promote encounters and conversations that challenge the reduction of persons to abstractions where “there are no citizens, only votes; no poor, only thresholds of poverty; no migrants, only quotas; no workers, only economic markers” (Pope Francis) through our Common Grounds Conversation series.

     

    Our programs are advertised though our weekly newsletter where you can sign up.