Hands-on learning. That’s part of what drives Campus Ministry at St. Viator Parish School in Las Vegas, and its most recent service project showed why: they packed hygiene kits for at risk children and teens in the Las Vegas area.
Associate Janet Manfredi helps her seventh graders assemble kits.
Led by Associate Rosy Hartz, students partnered with Clean the World, a global health organization which recycles bars of soap from hotels, sanitizing them and melting them into new bars, as well as bottled amenities. Their “Soap Saves Lives Boxes” include these and other hygiene products for vulnerable communities.
St. Viator students worked throughout a recent school day to assemble these boxes. Beyond new bars of soap, they included shampoo, socks, tooth bush, toothpaste, and clean wipes.
Fr. Richard Rinn and eighth grader Luke Syvelstri work together.
Rosy described the assembly line project as a powerful lesson in social justice.
“It reinforced who students are as Viatorians — called to “embrace those accounted of little importance,” she said, “and their call to understand Catholic social teachings and how to live this out every day.”
Several Viatorians rolled their sleeves up to help, including Fr. Richard Rinn, Fr. Lawrence Lentz, Fr. Daniel Nolan and Associates Rosy Hartz and Janet Manfredi. Together, they packed a whopping 900 kits.
Fr. Dan Nolan works with students.
Those kits are being distributed to Nevada Partnership for Homeless youth (200), Street Teens (200), and The Just One Project (500), a pop-up mobile market started by a Las Vegas mother.
“The kits went to teens their age, which is what made this project so moving and powerful,” Rosy said. “It was a good day to be a Viatorian!”