By Susan Gallagher

Six people from Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest will work in the Missoula area during the coming year, helping organizations that serve people who are homeless, mentally ill or in transition after suffering domestic violence.

Committed to advancing social justice and willing to live on lean budgets, the six constitute Missoula’s second cohort from Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest, which first placed volunteers in the city last year. The new group of volunteers arrived this month to work with the Poverello Center, which assists homeless people; the YWCA and SAFE Harbor, which assist people who have experienced household violence; and Western Montana Mental Health Center.

Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest annually places more than 100 volunteers in five states: Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington, as well as Montana. The Montana volunteers are in Billings, Ashland and Hays, along with Missoula.

Volunteers do not arrive with parish affiliations but in the communities to which they are assigned, they do seek to connect with Jesuits who may be present, said Leah Nusse, recruitment and alumni coordinator for Oregon-based Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest. The organization covers the basic living expenses of volunteers and gives each a monthly stipend of $80. Volunteers, typically in their 20s, share a house and are expected to live a simple, faith-centered way of life.

Jesuit Volunteers make a one-year commitment to service and may request extensions. That’s what 24-year-old Jacqueline Devereaux did. She served in Spokane, Wash., for a year, and in 2009 moved to Missoula to work at Salcido Center, a drop-in facility for people who are chronically homeless, suffer mental illnesses, depend on chemicals or have a combination of those problems.

“I wanted to try living what we are called to do as Catholics, and live in solidarity with the poor,” said Devereaux, whose work included helping people connect with resources to obtain the education necessary for a high school equivalency diploma. Devereaux became a volunteer after graduating from Virginia’s College of William & Mary, where she majored in religious studies. She plans to attend graduate school at the University of Montana in Missoula, and anticipates working in public health.

After serving as a volunteer, she said, “you go back into normal life and you realize there are some things you are always going to think differently about.”

She said that she and the three volunteers with whom she lived got by on a weekly food budget of about $50—for the entire group—and that doing so “makes you realize the limitations of people living on small incomes.”

The new group of volunteers in Missoula includes a returnee, Jen Certa, 23. She worked at the YWCA last year and will remain there, helping women and children who have left violent homes. The 2009 graduate of Fordham University in New York links women to services such as counseling, and provides activities for children. Fordham is a Jesuit university with a strong social-justice tradition, and Certa said that influenced her decision to volunteer. Now she wants to earn a master’s degree in social work. “The work I’ve been doing this past year has had a profound impact on my life,” said Certa, adding that Jesuit volunteer service challenges people “to go outside your comfort zone, and it challenges your ideas about the limits on what you can do.”


Published in The Montana Catholic Online, Volume 26, No. 8, August 20, 2010.