The gathering was convened by the pope so that representatives from all areas of the church, from cardinals to lay people, could focus on synodality–the process of working together on how the church will move forward. This meeting is the first of its kind to include women as voting delegates.

“I feel so blessed to be a part of this,” said Mollie Clark, a Fordham junior.

“Women’s voices are being honored and heard for the first time in the synodal process. This is such an affirming thing,” said Clark, who acknowledged “a lot of internal struggle at times” with the church’s stance on women’s participation. “I know that God is listening to my voice.”

A Global Conference

David Gibson, director of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture and a former Vatican reporter who will accompany the group, said, “It’s simply a global conversation that is the fruit of two years of listening.” 

Pope Francis asked for churches and dioceses all over the world to survey clergy and lay members alike as a prelude to the meeting, which he opened on Oct. 4. As part of this process of synodality, or “journeying together,” the same discussions were happening in nations across the globe about how to be a more inclusive church, a less clerical church, said Gibson, as well as how to increase the role of women and young people.

Fordham is the only Jesuit university to send a student group to Rome for this synod convened by Pope Francis–the first Jesuit pope.

Church on the Go

In the spring, Vanessa Rotondo, Fordham adjunct professor and deputy chief of staff to the  University’s president, Tania Tetlow, organized a screening of the Hulu documentary The Pope: Answers and was amazed at the high student turnout.

That event inspired her to propose a course called Church on the GO: Theology in a Global Synod to further “develop student understanding of the postmodern church in tandem with and in light of the Synod on Synodality.” Earlier this year, she traveled to Rome to pursue permission for its students to take part in synod-related events.

Student Itinerary

Rotondo and Gibson developed a series of activities for the students while they are in Rome. They will hear from synodal leaders such as Sister Nathalie Becquart, a voting member who helped facilitate the pope’s canvassing of church members worldwide; join press conferences; and take part in community engagement projects with both Villa Nazareth, a house of humanistic and spiritual formation for college students, and Sant’Egidio, a social service agency focused on global peace and interfaith dialogue. The group will also spend time at the School of Peace, where they will participate in an interfaith prayer service and prepare and distribute meals to people experiencing hunger and homelessness. 

Rotondo also devised two leadership sessions with the grassroots organization Discerning Deacons that are rooted in active listening and the synodal process. The goal is to give the students a sense of how the synod is working and train them in Ignatian reflection so they can devise an action plan to enhance Fordham’s mission and Catholic identity when they return.

‘Our Church is Alive’

AnnaMarie Pacione, a Fordham sophomore in the group, said the synod gives her hope.

“Our church is alive, and it’s growing, and it’s breathing and listening to everyone, as it should,” she said. “It’s more reflective of God’s love, Jesus’s love, as I know it, with this commitment and responsibility to listen to voices that have been suppressed in the past.”

A Blog for Dispatches

The students will post to the Sapientia blog of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture throughout their weeklong trip and will document their experience on the Instagram account @synodalfordham.

In addition to Clark and Pacione, the Fordham students include Eli Taylor, a theology master’s student; Fordham College at Rose Hill seniors Augustine Preziosi and Sean Power; Fordham College at Rose Hill junior James Haddad; Fordham College at Rose Hill sophomores Abigail Adams, Seamus Dougherty, Jay Doherty, and Kaitlyn Squyres; and Fordham College at Lincoln Center junior William Gualtiere.

John Cecero, S.J., Fordham’s vice president for mission integration and ministry, and Michael Lee, Ph.D., director of the Francis & Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, are accompanying the group.

Students in the Ignatian Community of Practice participate in an interfaith dialogue on March 29 with  Vinny Marchionni, S.J., Tabatha Holley, lead pastor of New Day Church, and Hanadi Doleh, director of community partnerships at Interfaith Center of New York.

Service has always been a core part of Fordham’s Catholic American Studies concentration, a selective program designed to give undergraduate students of any major a deeper appreciation of the historical, theological, and cultural manifestations of Catholicism.

But this semester, the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, which supervises the program, partnered with the Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL), to expand on what it means to serve others.

“The old Jesuit motto is ‘men and women for others,’ but now at Fordham, we’re more about ‘men and women with and for others,’ said Michael Lee, Ph.D., professor of theology and director of the Curran Center.

“I think that that’s key here.”

In January, a group of eleven students in the concentration began meeting every two weeks as part of an “Ignatian Community of Practice.”

Guided conversations have focused on their responsibilities to their communities, the ways different faith traditions address social challenges, the ethical obligations that come with their academic work, and continuing along a path of discernment.

Lee said the meetings are part of a shift of the guiding philosophy of the concentration’s service requirement—from a “service-learning” model to a “community-engaged” or “community asset-based” approach. Elements from the meetings will be incorporated into the Discernment Seminar, a class that all Catholic American Studies students are required to take their sophomore year. As a result, when they engage in service in the future, all of them will work with community partners from whom they will learn as partners. This could entail assisting at organizations such as P.O.T.S., a community group near the Rose Hill campus, the Mary Mitchell Family and Youth Center, or The Bronx is Blooming.

“I want us to think about our place in the neighborhood and within the wider public, and think about not just a service requirement, but a way of partnering with neighbors and mutually learning,” he said.

Lifting Up Community Voices

Grace Powers, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, is one of 11 students in the concentration who were invited to join the Ignatian Community of Practice. Four years ago, she left a small Kentucky town of roughly 4,500 people to find a more diverse, LGBTQ-friendly populace in New York City. A sociology and history major, Powers says Fordham’s Jesuit heritage has also expanded her perspective of her Catholic faith.

“I’ve come to really appreciate how the Jesuits incorporate Catholicism into daily life,” she said.

“Community engagement and accompaniment focuses more on going into a community and uplifting the voices that are there and listening to their perspectives about what they need.”

She has found particular appeal in the Catholic saying that there are “two feet of justice”: works of mercy and charity, and works of social action. If the first entails volunteering at a soup kitchen, the second might be discussing why a soup kitchen exists in the first place.

From the Bronx to El Salvador

Vanessa Rotondo, associate director of campus engagement and senior advisor for Ignatian Leadership at CCEL, said her partnership with the Curran Center is a natural extension of CCEL’s focus on programs that build community engagement in the Bronx through research projects on health care, housing, and education.

“We saw the students in the American Catholic Studies concentration as the perfect partners, given their intent is to understand emerging Catholic identity as it’s understood by its Greek translation of ‘universal.’”

In one of the meetings, the group covered the underpinnings of Jesuit education; another took place with Frankelly Martinez, program manager at Christian Aid in the Dominican Republic, and Francisco Mena Ugarte, executive director of Christians for Peace in El Salvador. Several members of the community also traveled with Lee to El Salvador as part of his class El Salvador: Revolutionary Faith.

The group’s final meeting will feature Fordham alumni who speak with students about how these lessons and experiences can be applied after graduation.

A Time for Quiet Reflection

Nolan Chiles, a senior integrated neuroscience major, said many students in the group have known each other since their first year at Fordham, so the dialogue tends to be richer than it might be with strangers.

“At the end of our meetings, we do a quiet reflection for a couple of minutes. Sometimes we’ll say a prayer, and then we’re all encouraged to go around in a circle and share whatever it was that came to light for us,” he said.

“It’s a great time to hear other students’ takes.”

Students in the Ignatian Community of Practice participate in an interfaith dialogue on March 29 with  Vinny Marchionni, S.J., Tabatha Holley, lead pastor of New Day Church, and Hanadi Doleh, director of community partnerships at Interfaith Center of New York.

“It’s a humbling experience—it makes me feel like I’m part of something bigger,” said Petalcorin, a Gabelli School of Business sophomore who is now a Global Outreach team leader. “Something we like to say is ‘exist outside of yourself.’”

Petalcorin and her fellow classmates spent a week in Aberdeen, Mississippi, trying to do just that. They immersed themselves with Camp Friendship, one of Fordham’s long-standing community engaged learning partners, and worked with the students as camp counselors, where they learned from foster care children and their service providers.

“When you learn the struggles of the community as well as their strengths, you get to understand how to empathize, not sympathize,” she said, “and [you]work in solidarity.”

History of ¡GO!

Today, Global Outreach—often known simply as ¡GO!—runs about 15 projects each year, all of them centered on social justice and community engagement in the U.S. and abroad. But the program can trace its roots to a single trip to Mexico in 1962.

That summer, a group of 27 students traveled to Mexico, where they worked on various community development projects, such as building homes, teaching classes, and volunteering in the local hospital, according to Vanessa Rotondo, FCRH ’17, GSE ’19, the associate director of campus engagement and senior advisor for Ignatian leadership at Fordham.

Rotondo said that the Mexico project continued for years and inspired a similar series of projects in Peru. By 1988, the program was known as Global Outreach, and it continued to grow, sending students to more than 30 countries and many domestic locations, including India, El Salvador, Kenya, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and San Jose.

In 2018, the program was brought under the auspices of the newly formed Center for Community Engaged Learning. It has continued to evolve while staying rooted to the same core values, according to Ben Medeiros, FCRH ’22, an immersion coordinator for the center.

“The Jesuit value of being men and women for and with others—to see that last … I think that’s really impressive,” he said.

Rotondo said she and her colleagues are very intentional about connecting local community partners with the student leaders early, usually via Zoom well in advance of the project, to help them gain an understanding of the community where they will be working and learning. And the groups meet multiple times throughout the semester before they leave, because Medeiros said that he’s “a huge advocate of community happening before they get there.”

The students are also tasked with developing “sustainable outcomes,” or ways they can continue the work beyond the one experience.

For Rotondo, this work is designed to help students “be transformed,” she said, using a phrase from Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador who spoke out against the treatment of the poor before he was assassinated in 1980. The goal is for the experience to help students become global-minded leaders engaged with issues affecting their community.

A Transformational Experience

Petalcorin said she felt this transformation when she returned from her first ¡GO! project and recalled a message from Joseph M. McShane, S.J., then president of Fordham, who encouraged students to “be bothered by injustice.”

“After going with GO, I was bothered,” she said, adding that “in a perfect world,” the students she met in Mississippi wouldn’t be in foster care. “Some people think it’s a week and you don’t think about it—you’re there for a week, but you take so much after it.”

That certainly was the case with Joseph Woodring, D.O., FCRH ’98. As a Fordham undergraduate, he participated in a 1995 ¡GO! India project and learned to connect with suffering and honor the human dignity of sick and impoverished people. That experience came flashing back to him a several years later, he told Fordham Magazine in 2015, when he was comforting a patient who was dying in Kolkata. “If I don’t get upstream and learn what these guys have,” he thought, “I’m not fixing anything. I want to be able to actually treat people.”

He became an epidemiologist, and his career has included deploying to Liberia with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2014 to help contain the Ebola outbreak there.

For Eric Stolar, FCRH ’19, participating in two ¡GO! Projects—in San Jose, California, and Nicaragua—helped reshape his worldview and connect his education to real-life situations.

“I came from a fairly privileged background … and GO and Urban Plunge challenged that immediately,” he said, referring to the preorientation program designed to connect first-year and transfer students with neighborhoods and community leaders in New York City. “The way I’ve learned to be able to talk about social injustices, to talk with people with different backgrounds—coming into Fordham I definitely didn’t have those skills. I genuinely cannot thank [those programs]enough for forcing me to grow.”

Both Global Outreach trips allowed him to see and understand the impact of U.S. policies in practice. In San Jose, for example, he was part of a team working with recent immigrants from Mexico. In Nicaragua, he and his team were on the ground when former President Donald Trump made disparaging remarks about Central American countries.

“We were quite literally approached by people of Nicaragua, asking, ‘How do you feel about this?’” he said. “We got to see the impact of how small of a thing like a tweet our president made had. That was something that I was something I was incredibly grateful for, that I got to have that education at Fordham—discussing current events and [their impact]personally, academically, civically.”

Now the assistant dean for student leadership and engagement at Allegheny College, Stolar said he tries to infuse into his work with students some lessons he learned from Global Outreach, such as helping undergraduates see social issues through “a lens that’s academically driven and grounded in core principles.”

Putting the Mission into Practice

Petalcorin recently led a ¡GO! trip over spring break to North Carolina as a part of the Ignite Scholars Program through the Gabelli School of Business. The students worked with the Industrial Commons, a group that supports “employee-owned social enterprises and industrial cooperatives, and supports frontline workers.”

She said that the project helped students think about the Gabelli School’s focus on “business with a higher purpose,” and learn about sustainable business practices designed not only to generate profits but also to “help others advance.”

Community Connections

Daniel Gibney, FCRH ’14, participated in ¡GO! as a student, and today he’s a community organizer with JOIN, the Justice Organizing Interfaith Network, in Alaska. He said Rotondo’s predecessor at the center had been reaching out to alumni for potential partnerships before COVID hit. He recently reconnected with Rotondo, and they worked together on a ¡GO! Alaska project.

As a part of the experience, the students went to a local Anchorage Assembly meeting. Gibney acknowledged that local government meetings aren’t always the most interesting, but the students were engaged—and many “had never experienced anything like” watching local government in action, he said, and seeing how elected officials make decisions that directly impact people’s day-to-day lives.

“And that evening I remember several students said, ‘I am going to go to the New York Assembly when I get home. I’m going to start going to local government meetings,’” Gibney said, adding that students during the Alaska project, students also met directly with government officials, community agencies, and residents, sharing a few meals with them to better connect.

“You go to a place, you learn about it,” he said, and “you build relationships with people who are there.”

Supporting Students Along the Way

In honor of the program’s 60th anniversary, Global Outreach is hosting a gala on Saturday, April 15, and has launched a fundraising campaign to “support student scholarships and create more opportunities” for students to participate in Global Outreach. The program offers scholarships to about one-third of participants, and students also fundraise to cover a portion of the costs, which can range from $600 to $1,600 per student per project.

To learn more about the campaign, as well as upcoming events, visit fordham.edu/go.

“The formation process is now intentionally crafted with the location and partners in mind, and the focus on historical context and social justice as they relate to each project is stronger,” said Vanessa Rotondo, assistant director of immersions and senior adviser on Ignatian leadership at CCEL.

Over the past three decades, the program—more popularly known as GO!—has sent thousands of students to 36 different countries. These trips have always served as opportunities for students to meet people from different backgrounds and reimagine their perspective on the world. But when the program became part of CCEL four years ago, the way that students prepared for their trips changed. 

In a 10-week “formation” process before their trip, they research and discuss the cultural, socioeconomic, and historic factors surrounding their trip. Instead of meeting community partners during the first few days of the trip, they also meet in advance on Zoom. After the trip is over, the students develop “sustainable outcomes,” or ways that they continue to apply the lessons from their trip to the classroom and beyond. 

But throughout the years, the main goal of GO! has stayed the same. 

“Fordham’s mission states that we seek to create global leaders. Global Outreach is the lived incarnation of that mission,” Rotondo said. “Having done a number of these projects myself—both as a student and now as an administrator—I think they are some of the most transformative experiences that the University offers.”

During the first year of the pandemic, GO! canceled several planned trips and pivoted to a virtual experience with several countries, including the Dominican Republic. The program also developed a civic education and digital activism project called GO! Vote where students raised political awareness across campus. In 2021, students resumed in-person experiences, but stayed close to home. 

‘Personal Care and Pride’ in Bronx Parks

One of the biggest GO! projects of 2021 was a two-semester experience where students partnered with local nonprofit The Bronx is Blooming to learn about environmental justice in the Bronx. During the formation process, the team met with their community partners and discussed how inadequate government funding has led to public parks becoming breeding grounds for invasive plant species, in comparison to privately funded parks. Then they traveled to actual parks across the Bronx, where they removed several invasive species and partially restored the natural environment. 

One popular local invasive species is Phragmites australis, a reed with a thick plume of seeds that had grown so thick in a Crotona Park pond that it choked out the native wildlife and their habitats, said Amelia Medved, FCRH ’23. Her team wore chest waders and entered the pond, where they hacked away at the plants and cleared them out. A few weeks later, they returned to tear out the regrown sprouts and replace them with native plants, including irises and blueberry bushes, that support local wildlife. 

Besides working in nature, the students became acquainted with the community. They created homemade seed balls—seeds wrapped in soil and clay that can be planted anywhere—and set them up on a table along the Mosholu Parkway, where residents could take them home and talk to students about their own relationship with the public parks, said Medved. 

“We developed a real attachment to the parks and this mindset that we can use later in life … how caring for the local ecosystem in our neighborhood is something that we can take personal care and pride in,” said Medved, an environmental studies and visual arts double major who plans on becoming a landscape architect. “It’s not a one-time volunteer day—it’s an ongoing effort.”

Another local GO! project was the Bronx Immigration Project. Students supported the work of three organizations, including the Violence Intervention Program, to host food, toy, and clothing drives for women and children from underserved backgrounds, especially those that have experienced abuse. 

“The center helped me realize that there is a way for academics to be engaged in the world,” said Benedict Reilly, FCRH ’23, a theology and religious studies and humanitarian studies double major who participated in the project last fall, “and I want to continue doing that.” 

‘A Heartbreaking Reality Check’ at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Other students traveled to the edge of the U.S. Earlier this month, a group of students traveled to Puerto Rico for a nine-day trip. They worked closely with APRODEC, a nonprofit that ​​serves the northeastern region, to renovate their Eastern Ecotourism Center—a place where the community will work together to promote their economy and people through sustainable tourism practices. 

Emely Paulino Cuevas, FCRH ’22, said she observed a strong sense of community abroad that reminded her of her native Bronx.

“We don’t have the best reputation. A lot of people have given up on us. But what I’ve seen throughout the years and learned through history is that many people from the Bronx have supported one another in order to rebuild our community,” said Cuevas, a psychology student on the five-year teacher education track who plans on becoming a kindergarten teacher. “And I see that in Puerto Rico, too.” 

More than 2,000 miles away, another group of students visited the border between the U.S. and Mexico.  

“Our goal was to better understand the realities of life on the border. These things can be hard to understand when you’re not physically there,” said Lauren Pecora, FCRH ’22, who served as the trip’s student leader.

In collaboration with the Kino Border Initiative, Pecora organized and led weekly meetings throughout the fall semester, where students learned about the immigration process and discussed what it meant to enter new communities. The main highlight of the actual “immersion,” or trip, said Pecora, was listening to migrants tell their own stories. She recalled a 20-year-old man named Aldo who fled from the drug cartel in his native Honduras, where they had been trying to recruit him. 

“He had to deal with corrupt authorities and violent experiences. Hearing all of this, and then playing soccer with him and the kids at the shelter and then realizing that he’s our age—it’s a heartbreaking reality check that he could be us,” said Pecora. 

Over the next few weeks, Pecora said her team will come up with ways to stay connected to the national issue. Among them are a letter-writing event and involvement in the Hostile Terrain 94 art exhibit that moved from the Lincoln Center campus to Rose Hill this semester. What has stayed with her was physically witnessing the complexity of real-life issues, she said. 

“I thought each experience would become a puzzle piece that created this picture of migration that I was missing, that these experiences would simplify the picture for me. But it really didn’t. It complicated it, in a very real way,” said Pecora, an international studies and theology double major who is considering working in community engagement for a nonprofit after she graduates from Fordham this spring. “And I think that speaks to Global Outreach’s mission: for students to be challenged by these partnerships with organizations around the world.” 

“Our student leaders are creating projects where they’re asking important questions in tandem with community partners and trying to provide solutions that are informed by both data and our community partners’ experiences,” said Vanessa Rotondo, assistant director of immersions and senior adviser of Ignatian leadership at CCEL. “I hope that they are able to break down that wall that Fordham students have by virtue of being part of an academic institution, and contribute something to our community.” 

The Engaged Leaders Fellowship is a year-long program where students address local issues with community partners. The fellowship began in fall 2020 with two student cohorts. Each group featured 12 students who were nominated by Fordham community members and selected through interviews with CCEL. They were divided into smaller groups based on their interests and met biweekly to develop their initial ideas. Throughout the year, they worked on projects that relied on in-depth interviews with community partners and academic data. The following spring, they presented their findings at Fordham’s undergraduate research symposium. 

Amalia Sordo Palacios, FCRH ’23, is a member of the inaugural cohort. Palacios and two other students examined how the pandemic affected high schoolers’ post-graduation plans through online surveys. They partnered with the Bronx Community Foundation, who connected them with organizations that put them in touch with high schoolers.

“When we were brainstorming project ideas, we didn’t want to come up with an idea that was interesting to us, but wouldn’t have an impact on the community we were trying to learn about. So we reached out to the foundation and asked them if there were any needs,” said Palacios, a psychology student on the pre-health track. “It was incredibly helpful to get to know community organizations like the Bronx Community Foundation. I’m hoping to continue that kind of work in the future.”

Surveying Pregnant and Unvaccinated Women in the Bronx

Last fall, the third cohort started the fellowship program. They are working on three research projects based in the Bronx: one on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among pregnant women, one on the experience of homelessness, and one on the efficiency of a Fordham tutoring program for local high school students. 

Mari Teli, FCRH ’22, is a member of the first group. After consulting with several organizations, including the Tremont Neighborhood Health Action Center, they developed an online survey for pregnant women who have not received a coronavirus vaccine to understand how they view the health care system and the vaccine itself. This spring semester, their goal is to distribute their survey through the help of community partners and receive 50 to 75 responses. 

“Is it specific news stories that hold people back? Friends and family who have had bad experiences with the vaccine? A language barrier? What is leading them to make this decision?” said Teli, a double major in biological sciences and political science who plans on becoming a gynecologist. 

Breaking Down Stereotypes on Homelessness

Benjamin Medeiros, FCRH ’22, is working with three other students and a men’s shelter in the South Bronx to dismantle stigmatization surrounding the homeless population. First, they will conduct one-on-one interviews with several clients at the shelter. “We want to get a better idea of who these men are and get to know them as people. What are their interests and hobbies beyond their living situation?” said Medeiros. 

Next, they will survey Fordham students about their perspective on the homeless population. For example, they will ask students to guess the average education level, work experience, and demographic for the homeless population, said Medeiros. Then they will show their research results to both populations. 

The goal of their project is to humanize the men’s shelter clients and to reshape the students’ perspectives on what it means to be homeless and who is in that population, said Medeiros, who will present his findings with the rest of the cohort at the undergraduate research symposium on May 4. 

“The point of our project is to bridge the gap between these two worlds. That’s also the point of this fellowship—to bridge the gap between Fordham and the community beyond campus. We are surrounded by the Bronx, an amazing community filled with amazing people, and we want more students to realize their ability and potential to help our neighbors. This is a really great opportunity for us to do that,” said Medeiros, a psychology student whose goal is to become a school counselor. 

Research Done ‘Not in the Typical Way You Imagine’

The last project is personal for one student. Jacob Weinberg and his classmates are evaluating the efficiency of a CCEL college access program for high school students by interviewing Fordham administrators and the students themselves. He said this project reminds him of his mother, who would have benefited from a similar program. 

“My mom is incredibly smart, but she didn’t have access to these kinds of resources. She wasn’t taught how to apply to college, so she never went. I want to right a wrong from the past and give these kids an opportunity to go on to higher education, if that’s what they want,” said Weinberg, a sophomore studying international political economy at Fordham College at Rose Hill. 

“This fellowship is an opportunity for undergraduates to do research—not in the typical way you imagine,” he added, “but research that can be used to make a tangible change in our community and highlight the inequalities and differences that are so prevalent in society today.”