Siena readies justice center

A half-million dollars buys a lot. At Siena College in Loudonville, it may buy a generation of alumni who become lifelong advocates for the poor and volunteers with service organizations.

The college recently announced its receipt of a $500,000 grant from the Franciscans of Holy Name province, the largest group of Franciscan friars in the U.S., to create the "Franciscan Center for Service and Advocacy at Siena College."

Siena president Rev. Kevin Mackin, OFM, called it "the friars' deepest hope" that the new center "will assist our students to intelligently, creatively and generously discover how they might repay the debt they owe, especially to their brothers and sisters in need."

Students may do so through the center's planned academic courses and seminars on service and advocacy, its opportunities for internship placements with social service and charitable organizations, and its encouragement toward a year of volunteer service work after graduation.

In founding the center, Siena will build on its existing advocacy efforts: a Peace Studies program in place for the past 12 years; annual Spring Break trips for students to work with the poor at St. Francis Inn, a Philadelphia soup kitchen; and the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King Lecture on Race and Nonviolent Social Change.

The center will focus its efforts on developing new courses to teach students the root causes of poverty, social problems, alienation and the lack of equal opportunity in society. Students in any major will even have the opportunity to minor in "service and advocacy."

"Siena is grateful for this opportunity," Father Mackin stated. "Our center will raise the profile of the college's commitment to the Franciscan traditions of service and advocacy."

The center's aim will be simple, he noted: "Given the fact that our Franciscan vision of education seeks to respect and cultivate the development of the whole human person, we believe we can impart no greater lesson than a thirst for justice." (KB)

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