Glenmary Farm high-school and college volunteers build houses,
create good will for Catholic Church

MAKING A DIFFERENCE: Students from Dowling High School in West Des Moines, Iowa, work at a building site with People’s Self-Help Housing..

Glenmary volunteer director Joe Grosek is a popular guy in Lewis County, Ky., the location of the Glenmary Farm. Wherever he goes he hears, “You do great work!” But he knows those compliments really belong to the volunteers who have been coming to the Farm since the 1970s by the van-load from colleges and high schools all over the United States. In 2005, a typical year at the Farm, over 500 students from more than 40 colleges, high schools and parish youth groups experienced a week of service, prayerful reflection, community and immersion into Appalachian culture.

A Jesuit high school—Marquette University High School in Milwaukee, Wis.—was among the first schools to begin regularly sending students to the Farm to help Glenmary serve the needs of Lewis County, one of the most impoverished counties in Kentucky. Nowhere are the fruits of this service more evident than in the work Farm volunteers do with People’s Self-Help Housing.

This nonprofit housing program, founded by Glenmary Brother Bob Hoffman in the late 1970s, continues today under the direction of Dave Kreher, a former Farm volunteer. With the help of Farm volunteers, People’s Self Help Housing each year constructs 24 new affordable homes—two each month—for local families. They also complete about 25 home repair and rehab jobs.

Their main source of funding is state and federal grants that require a matching contribution. “We can use volunteer labor as our match,” says Dave Kreher, “and that makes us very competitive.” He is referring to the over 4,000 hours of labor provided each year by Farm volunteers. Since granting organizations assign a value of $10 an hour to volunteer labor, Dave can report a “match” of $40,000 when applying for grants to support People’s housing efforts.

Research into the archives reveals that students from Gannon University (Erie, Pa.) were also among the early groups of volunteers to visit the Farm—and to keep coming year after year.

Many Gannon students have never seen poverty before their visit to the Farm and think that such conditions are quite remote, says Gannon’s campus ministry director Deacon Steve Washek. But at the Farm, he says, “Their thinking changes from ‘My world is no bigger than Erie,’ to ‘I have a responsibility to others in the world.’ Mission trips, like the trip to the Farm, take them out of their comfort zone.”

Terry Kelly, a Marquette University High School English teacher who is involved with the school’s service program, highlights another benefit of the Farm program: “We like the spiritual component at the Farm and the attitude of prayer,” he says. “When students go on mission to a place like the Farm, they get an insight into a different way of life and a different mindset.”

Farm volunteers always emphasize that they gain far more from their Farm experience than they give. But the service they are providing to People’s Self-Help Housing and the families of Lewis County has real value. And so does the climate of good will they create for the Catholic community in Lewis County.

Steve Washek reports that only 50 percent of the students who travel to the Farm from Gannon University are Catholic. Twenty percent of the students from Marquette are not Catholic, according to Terry Kelly. Yet folks in Lewis County identify them all as “those Catholic kids from the Farm,” and Joe Grosek counts them all as crucial partners in Glenmary’s mission.

The story above first appeared in the Winter 2006 Glenmary Challenge.
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