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Student Life

As the center of Catholic values on the UIC campus, the John Paul II Newman Center recognizes the crucial importance of helping students to help others. In the spirit of Christ’s commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself,” the Newman community strives to reach out beyond its walls to those in need in the greater Chicago area, and to impress upon the students the vital imperative of service to others—an imperative that is the crux of the Christian experience.


The Newman Center offers a variety of service opportunities to the students throughout the school year:
• The Center regularly hosts monthly “Service Sundays,” in which dozens of students make hundreds of sandwiches for the homeless and hungry at the Franciscan Outreach Center in Bucktown.
• In September, 2007, the Newman Center hosted a Blood Drive, which benefited the UIC Hospital blood bank.
• For Thanksgiving, more than a hundred students participated in the “UIC Gives Back” project, in which groups of students sponsored forty families in the Little Village area of Chicago, bringing boxes filled with all the family would need for a full Thanksgiving dinner, right to the families’ doors.
• For spring break, 2008, the Newman Center will send a delegation of students down to the Appalachian region to help rebuild houses through the Christian Appalachian Project.
• Newman students are involved in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, in which they serve as a mentor to a specific child in need, and spend time with that child every week.


However, Christian service does not stop at the deed of service. At the Newman Center, Christian service and spiritual reflection go hand in hand. The Newman Center hosts a branch of the St Vincent De Paul Society, which meets twice a month and in which students explore the meaning behind the Christian call to serve, and learn how to integrate service to the poor into their understanding of leading a faith-filled life. The St Vincent De Paul Society strives to take acts of service further, going beyond the idea of service as “doing something nice,” to the understanding that to serve is to follow God’s call, and indeed, to be fully human.