PROVIDENCE COLLEGE STUDENTS: TRANSFORMING SOCIETY

Posted on May 15, 2025

“Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.”

– Mother Teresa

Community service initiatives play a vital role in the Providence College (PC) experience. PC students complete thousands of hours of community service every year. It’s a way of life for most students who are eager to give back to the community that they call home during their time at PC. More than 83 community agencies, schools, and other non-profit sites in the Greater Providence area benefited from PC students’ volunteer time and talent this academic year. Volunteer service is provided through the Office of the Chaplain/Campus Ministry, the Office of Student Affairs, the Feinstein Institute for Public Service, the Office of Public Affairs, Government and Community Relations, the Student Athlete Advisory Council, and many of the College’s student clubs, organizations, and service-learning classes.

FriarServe is a service initiative now in its eighth year. In 2017, PC committed a $100,000 gift to Catholic schools in the Diocese of Providence in celebration of the College’s Centennial and in support of Catholic education in RI. In 2021, PC announced a second gift of $100,000, reaffirming the College’s support of Catholic education in the diocese. The College’s gifts were made through the Diocesan Catholic School Office (CSO) in equal sums for four years, with two major components. The money is used for scholarships given to students attending Catholic elementary and secondary schools via the CSO’s Anchor of Hope Fund, a diocesan financial assistance fund that helps financially strapped families secure a Catholic school education for their children. A portion of the funds are set aside specifically for five Catholic Pre-K – 8 schools in the Greater Providence area: Bishop McVinney School (South Providence), Blessed Sacrament School (Mt. Pleasant), St. Augustine School (also Mt. Pleasant), St. Pius V School (Elmhurst) and St. Rocco School (Johnston).

Perhaps the most important aspect of FriarServe is its community service component. PC students, staff and faculty are invited to volunteer their time at each of the five above-mentioned schools during the academic year. Not all schools have the same programs, but all have more than one. FriarServe continued its dedicated service to those schools again this academic year, providing activities including art club, tutoring, classroom assistance, homework help, gym takeover, as well as reading times.

Volunteer statistics for the 2024-2025 year of FriarServe are as follows:

Total numbers of volunteers: 208; Total number of volunteer hours: 1,222

Other notable PC student service projects:

66 PC first-year students participated in the FaithWorks pre-orientation service immersion program in August. The program, now in its thirteenth year, is led by upperclassmen peers (this year 20 upperclassmen). Sponsored by Campus Ministry, FaithWorks enables new PC students to build community with their peers, perform service work for vulnerable populations in Providence, and reflect on the significance of this work for their own lives. The participants were able to do service with sites in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, including Little Sisters of the Poor, My Brother’s Keeper; St. Patrick Cemetery, Smith Hill Early Child Development Center, Mother of Life Center, Emmanuel House Homeless Shelter, St. Augustine School, St. Pius V School, and Memorial Park.

The Service and Justice arm of Campus Ministry teamed up for the MLK Joint Day of Service to create bags for the unhoused of Emmanuel House. These bags included hand warmers, gloves and toiletries. One hundred three bags were created and distributed.

The student leaders of Elderly Outreach engaged hundreds of Friar students to personally handwrite seasonal cards to local homebound residents. Almost 300 handwritten cards were delivered for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter.

Coordinated through Friends of San Lucas, 12 students from various corners of PC will take part once again in May Immersion to Guatemala. Students will travel to Guatemala for a week-long immersion experience volunteering on build sites, in schools, and engaging with the San Lucas Community. They will work alongside the local and Indigenous community while learning about and from them.

Our year-round service programming volunteer hours are back to pre-Covid levels. Meal service sites in Providence served Mary House, St. Edward’s, and My Brother’s Keeper. We also provided support to St. Pius V in after school programming, on campus adult literacy programs for adults with adaptive and special needs, as well as four major Special Olympics events.

Established in 1993, the Feinstein Institute for Public Service at Providence College was created to support the major and minor in Public and Community Service Studies. After two decades, the Institute turned its efforts to campus-community partnerships aimed at addressing the larger questions underlying our public and community service systems. Since 2017, the Institute has worked with campus and community partners to focus its efforts on questions of racial and economic justice, particularly for youth and families, both locally and globally. This academic year, the Institute has collaborated with twenty-four community partners.

The Feinstein Institute’s Community Work Study Program placed Providence College student workers with seventeen schools and non-profits throughout the Providence area. Sixty-five students participated in the program and used their federal work study award to serve our partners in the local community in a variety of ways, including as an after-school tutor, health care advocate, or social media intern. The students have worked over 4,700 hours within the community over the past year, gaining professional experience working in non-profits and schools and contributing to community-wide systems that support Providence community members.

The Feinstein Institute’s Feinstein Community Fellows Program brings together undergraduate students and community partners who share the Feinstein Institute’s commitment to overcoming racial inequity, local and global poverty, and barriers to young people’s capacity to achieve their aspirations. Now in its seventh year, the program matched sixteen PC students with ten different community organizations. The Fellows were given their own project responsibilities that ranged from supporting day-to-day efforts at Inspiring Minds, to enhancing the training and workshops at Mentor RI, to serving as health advocates at Brown University Health. All of the Fellows participated in bi-weekly meetings to reflect on their service and examine social justice, non-profits, power, and privilege. Together, they completed over 1,500 hours of service throughout the 2024-2025 school year.

Athletics:

The Athletic Department’s commitment to service others, and our surrounding community remained consistently strong as demonstrated by the following data:

2024-25 – 4,004 service hours | $63,842 raised
2023-24 – 3,824 service hours | $79,972 raised
2022-23 – 3,783 service hours | $64,801 raised
2021-22 – 3,380 service hours | $69,601 raised
*Virtual only due to COVID pandemic
2020-21 – 406 service hours* $51,685 raised
2019-20 – 3,244 service hours | $82,486 raised
2018-19 – 3,547 service hours | $49,500 raised
2017-18 – 2,060 service hours | $28,800 raised

AtProvidence College, we embrace the opportunity of teaching our student-athletes to spark a lifelong commitment to serving others through experiences that develop genuine connections with our

communities. “The greatest gift you can give someone is your time.” This academic year, our student-athletes continued their outstanding work in the community and have volunteered the most hours in the

history of PC Athletics.

Every Providence College student-athlete, representing 19 varsity sports, participated in a range of

community service projects throughout the academic year. There were 457 participants out in the

community representing the Friars totaling 4,004 hours. The economic impact of these hours was $134,098. Friar student-athletes participated in 225 opportunities supporting 52 organizations. In total, they raised $63,842 for various charitable organizations for 2024-2025.

One of the top organizations is their yearly collaboration with the Adopt-a-Family Project, a program set in place by the DaVinci Center to improve the quality of life for the residents in the North End of Providence. This partnership allowed the entire athletic department & all teams to deliver over 400 gifts of clothing and toys to 81 children from 31 families. These gifts were the only ones these children received for the holiday.

The men’s and women’s swimming & diving teams continue to lead the Northeast in raising funds through the Swim Across America initiative to benefit cancer research. The funds this year were donated to Women & Infants Hospital in Providence, RI. The teams raised over $62,282 in September and have raised over $422,000 since the event was founded.

Each Fall, the Providence College community comes together to donate funds to the Smith Hill Advocacy and Research Partners (SHARP) efforts to provide a Thanksgiving Meal to the local community. Every varsity Friar athletics program donated funds, totaling $901.

For National Read Across America month (March) all 19 varsity sports participated in reading to local elementary school children as part of a BIG EAST Conference-wide competition. One hundred ten student-athletes volunteered their time to read a total of 174 books to 9 different schools.

Finally, the female student-athletes continued their partnership with Girls on the Run Rhode Island. At their fall 5K race, 133 of the women volunteered their time during this empowering program. In addition, 263 (every female student-athlete) participated in writing an inspirational note to the participants of the 5K including making posters for the race day itself.

Over the past eight years, student-athletes have completed 24,000 hours, raising $488,859. Since 2019, they have finished in the top 15 in Division I for community service hours every year. This year they finished number 10 in the country for service hours.

The PC community also supported numerous charitable organizations:

For the tenth year in a row, the President’s Standing Committee on Service (“the Service Board”) coordinated a Thanksgiving Drive, in partnership with the Smith Hill Advocacy and Research Partners (SHARP). The Board raised over $6,300 in monetary donations which helped provide a free Thanksgiving meal of a turkey and fixings to local families. A record-breaking total of 951 turkeys were distributed. These families were also presented with gift cards to local retail stores.

In March, the Service Board also ran a campus-wide clothing drive in conjunction with Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Rhode Island (BBBS of RI). Over 2,000 pounds of clothing were donated by members of the PC campus community to help support BBBS or RI’s mentoring programs.

Thanks to the generosity of the Friar Family (students, faculty, alumni, and families), the Office of Campus Ministry collected hundreds of gifts and gift cards for children at the Smith Hill Early Childhood Development Center and St. Patrick’s Church.