University of Portland Museum

Involved in One Another: UP the University OF, FOR, and WITH Portland

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Collage photo of the city of Portland skyline, tiny houses, student volunteers, and Portland street corner.

The Moreau Center for Service and Justice has their office and meeting areas in St. Mary’s Center.  That is not where the Center works.  Although located on campus, The Moreau Center has a larger horizon as an educational experience that does not take its focus from lecture, discussion, and essay assignments. The Moreau Center’s working space is off-campus, and, oftentimes, far, far, far indeed off campus.

The program year starts with the beginning of the school year, with an Urban Plunge witnessing the needs, conditions, lives of the dispossessed and houseless communities in the city of Portland.  This is a participatory field trip, where eyes are opened and hands engaged.  The fundamental learning principle is that our community is nested and situated within a network of communities.  The program-goal states the learning outcome as: Learn how University of Portland is the University OF, FOR, and WITH Portland and how you will be OF, FOR, and WITH Portland, too!  The human take-away of Plunge is how the participant enacts (is an action) human-formation, providing experience and witness to the truth that no person is an island to themselves.

The same mix of involvement, awareness, and education characterizes all witness and action, presence and service in Plunges and Immersions, whether local, stretching across the country, or beyond our national borders.  In the photo gallery here there are images from the decade 1987-1996, suggesting, correctly, that there is history here.  First, that economic insecurity and houselessness have a long pedigree.  Second, and notably, that UP has seen itself involved in our community for a very long time.  It is a character-value for the University which is often first rooted in the experiences of students, such that the institution takes this value from the students.  For example, already in 1952 Blanchet House was founded in a downtown Portland parish by Rev. Francis Kennard, the priest of that parish, and by students from UP (one of those students having grown up in that parish and bringing his UP classmates out to the city, into community service).  The Moreau Center and student immersions are continuous descendants of the Office of Volunteer Services (1985) and the Urban Plunges of that period.

  • Programs (a selection): Urban Plunge, Christmas in April, Transition Projects, Migrant Camp, Blanchet House, Salvation Army, Rural Plunge, Sisters of the Road Café
  • Tasks: painting, bread, hammering, scraping, cookies, stew, shovels, wheelbarrows
  • Goals: connection, service, awareness, sharing, compassion, equity, character, justice
  • Group of volunteer students building a barn.
  • Volunteers scrape paint from the side of a house.
  • Student volunteers serve bread and cookies in a food buffet line.
  • Priest hands off box of food to another person.
  • Two students hammer pieces of wood together.
  • Student holding a bucket and can of Ajax cleaner.
  • Student volunteer painting wood beams.
  • Volunteers painting the side of a building.
  • Students serve food in a buffet line.
  • Student volunteers wearing Rodda Paint caps and holding paint rollers, brushes, and pan.
  • Student volunteers sanding a roof beam.
  • Volunteers doing repair work outside a house.
  • Five people standing in front of Sisters of the Road cafe.
  • Volunteers sweep a narrow alleyway between buildings.
  • Six tiny houses under construction.
  • Volunteer sorts bags of clothing.
  • Two people pushing wheelbarrows.

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