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History, Overview, and Pillars

A Brief History of the Spring Break Service Trips Program

  • The Spring Break Service Trips program began in 1983 when a nursing student proposed that a group of 7 students go to Eastern KY to do service work.
  • The program has grown over the years so that we now send between 200-250 students.
  • The Creighton Center for Service and Justice took over some of the behind-the-scenes administrative tasks when it was created in 1995. But the SBST program has remained student-led and student-funded throughout its history.
  • We are part of something bigger than all of us and older than many of us! In the Jesuit tradition, and through the seven pillars of service, justice, solidarity, community, sustainability, simplicity, and reflection, we are all learning to become men and women for and with others.

The following is a brief refletion written by Molly Mertens that gives more insight into SBSTs.

The door to the home swung open and my eyes slowly adjusted as my group moved out of the natural light.  I walked into the living room and had to step over pieces of an abandoned life – hangers, books, and shoes – to get into the kitchen.  On the floor of the kitchen was a pair of jeans that were stiff from being submerged under flood waters for weeks following the hurricane.  The house, as it stood when we arrived, symbolized hopelessness, abandonment, and darkness.  I failed to identify God’s presences among such neglect.  As we began to work, I questioned whether my group’s approach to gutting the house modeled Christian behavior; it seemed as if each successive swing of the crow bar brought greater pleasure.
  A day and a half later, after hours of lugging, hammering, and shoveling, only the outdoor walls, the ceiling, the floor, and the structural beams still stood.  The dust began to settle as fellow group members swept up the remaining pieces of ceiling plaster.  I stood in a house that just one day before had been dark and lifeless, and looked up to see a beam of light streaming through a crack in the roof.  I thought of God – the light of the world.  God’s presence seemed to fill the house, and suddenly, the old adage that God works through people popped into my head.  Each swing of the hammer was not, in fact, an act of destruction.  Rather, it was an act of spreading God’s love to a place and to a people that were in dire need of it.