Service

Whether praying at Calvary Cemetery, working at the SFA Refugee Farmers' Market, or tutoring immigrants in English, SFA students are keeping the parish's mission alive throughout the community.

Committee on Conscience

Middle-school students make up the St. Francis Committee on Conscience (COC), a student-led organization that focuses on outreach. The COC has two goals:

  • to directly assist people who are vulnerable, marginalized, forgotten, or hurting, through service or through charitable fund raising; and

  • to move others to take healing actions toward those who need our help

The COC meets during and after school, on the weekends, and even during the summer months to plan and perform activities. Always at the core of our efforts is the wisdom and lessons students learn during their studies of the Gospels and the Holocaust.  SFA middle schoolers come to understand that our faith demands that we be a people of meaningful and sincere action. We are called to never be indifferent or silent in times when people are in need of caring, compassion, mercy, and justice. COC members leave St. Francis of Assisi School fully appreciating how powerful their words and actions can be when they are used  to create solidarity with people throughout our local and global communities.

HeartPaths

The HeartPaths Program provides students at St. Francis of Assisi with opportunities to become people who place great value in serving others. Students in each grade partner with groups in the community who need their help:  the elderly, veterans, animals, disabled and the terminally ill, refugees, and more. SFA views service as an important part of our faith and a way of helping children understand that they enrich their own lives when they help others.

In the summer leading up to their eighth-grade year, students are required to do at least 25 hours of community service work. For the last several years, each eighth-grade class of 30 students has performed well over the minimum by accumulating over 2,000 hours of service to the marginalized and most vulnerable people in our community. After their nine years of service work at SFA, an impressive 98 percent of students continue their volunteer efforts after graduating.