Over 140 eager Creighton students gathered in the Harper Ballroom to receive and prepare for their fall break service & justice trip locations at one of 16 different locations around the United States.

This year’s turnout for students attending the trips is the Schlegel Center for Service & Justice’s largest since the coronavirus pandemic put a momentary pause on the program several years ago.

For Cecelia Fuller, one of the four SCSJ team’s core members, the fall and spring break service trips are an incredibly important way for students to experience new things outside of the Creighton community.

“It’s such a great way to meet people, but also to experience something outside of your normal lens,” she said. “You experience people different from yourself, and you learn so much about issues that you had no idea existed in communities different than your own.”

Throughout the evening, students went through several different team bonding exercises before finally learning which location they would be heading to in October.

The list of possible locations was kept a tight secret until then, so everyone besides core team members and group leaders had no idea which location they would be heading to or who would be a part of their team.

For students on their first trip with the SCSJ, feelings of excitement and passion rippled across the room.

“I’m excited to meet new people and get to work,” said Luke Tooley, a sophomore in the College of Business. “Obviously there are some nerves involved since this is a new experience for me, but I’m excited to gain a new perspective on how other people live. We are very fortunate to be at Creighton, so I’m looking forward to being vulnerable with the people we are working with and to help as much as I can.”

For Kaden Luellman, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, the opportunity to do service with the SCSJ is something that he has been looking forward to further his Jesuit education experience.

“Trips like this really embody what Creighton is all about and emphasize their Jesuit values,” he said. “I know that going on this trip will help me to embody such values in my own life and will allow me to give back to a community that’s not mine.”

This year’s fall trips will be heading throughout the country for seven days to cities in West Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas, Missouri, Colorado, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Alabama, Tennessee, Minnesota, New Mexico and Indiana.

Each location will tackle a new issue, with a big part of their service being centered around the SCSJ’s “Praxis Spiral,” which can be seen on member’s shirts.

“We really emphasize service and justice,” Fuller said. “The spiral stands for three parts: the first being ‘what,’ as in what am I experiencing; the second part being ‘so what,’ as in why is what I’m experiencing important; and the third part, which we really emphasize towards the end of the trip, is ‘now what,’ which challenges students to come back to Creighton and take the things they have seen and learned about and create action moving forward.”