IVC Stories
What do you find challenging about retirement?
by Linda Wihl When I meet with potential volunteers I become keenly aware of how our culture squanders one of our greatest resources, retirees. When I ask retirees, “What do you find challenging about retirement?” I hear three common responses: “I miss...
Giving Back and Changing Lives for 20 Years
Lou Naglak, an Ignatian Volunteer in Philadelphia, has served prisoners at the Bucks County Prison for over 20 years. “I couldn’t have predicted this would be the next phase of my life,” he says. “I grew up in a coal town above Scranton, Pennsylvania. In the 1930s...
A Tradition of Ignatian Service and Spirituality: IVC and JVC
by Catherine Albornoz As we embark on a new year of service in September, we recognize all those in the Ignatian Volunteer Corps and our partners in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, with our shared mission of service and spirituality, at different stages of life. This...
My Kids
This blog post comes from Ignatian Volunteer Rich Pozdol of Chicago and is reprinted with permission from the IVC Chicago Footprints blog from earlier this year. Father “Bo” T.M. Lyons, spiritual director extraordinaire, and I were having dinner at Siam, my favorite...
Wrapped in Light
by Robin Cuddy “maybe death isn’t darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us—" —Mary Oliver In “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field,” poet Mary Oliver describes death in precise images drawn from nature—not as an end but as...
Prodigal Sons and Their Safe Haven
by Robin Cuddy The most recent Department of Housing and Urban Development report on homelessness, published in 2015, estimated that about 564,000 homeless people in the United States live in shelters or on the streets. For Jack O’Doherty, an Ignatian volunteer for...
Led Back to the Fold
by Robin Cuddy Hundreds of students at the Genesis Center in Providence, Rhode Island have touched Sandy Yates’s heart. Before becoming an Ignatian volunteer, Sandy had a twenty-eight year career in nursing and cared for sick children in the Intensive Care Unit, the...
Thoughtful, Prayerful Service
by Roberta "Robbie" Sabin This blog post is a presentation made by Ignatian Volunteer Robbie Sabin at IVC Baltimore's Advent Evening of Joyful Anticipation, which we asked her to share with our national IVC community. Good evening, my name is Robbie Sabin. I am an...
New Beginnings in Employment and Retirement
Ellen Stuhlmann helps homeless men and women find and sustain employment as an Ignatian Volunteer at Friendship Place in Washington DC. “It’s been wonderful”, she says of the IVC service experience. She came to IVC after retiring from a career as a publishing...