The Urban Challenge Program is an urban, service-learning, immersion experience rooted in the Catholic faith tradition. Offering a point of access to the lives and stories of the people of Camden, NJ, and its surrounding communities, the Urban Challenge Program (UCP) is a unique educational and retreat opportunity.
Serving mainly suburban high school and college aged students, the Program is built upon four fundamental components – prayer, service, education, and reflection. We hope that incorporating these components in the UCP will lead participants to future action on behalf of the poor and vulnerable.
Through prayer, students focus their activities and set their experience in Camden in front of a meaningful backdrop. Prayer includes reflection on Scripture, Catholic Social Teaching, and words from figures in our faith tradition— including Archbishop Oscar Romero— whose lives were changed by encountering Christ in the poor.
Service is arranged by the staff of the UCP with the intent of creating a space in which students will not only serve in the traditional sense (manual labor, babysitting, neighborhood clean-ups, serving food at soup kitchens and food banks) but also be present to the personhood of others (by spending time with people at nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, homeless shelters, drop-in centers for people infected and affected with HIV and AIDs, etc). These types of service experience allow students to enter into relationships which expose them to the challenges of life in the city of Camden and the sundry issues that confront persons living in America’s inner cities.
Educational activities (such as media and simulations, tours of the City of Camden, and “games” focused on social inequality) aim to work from the starting point of relationships formed at service to increase the knowledge of participants about those issues they have encountered. With those service experiences and educational activities in mind, the UCP incorporates guest lectures by local experts. These lecturers address groups with information that will enhance their learning experience and equip them with the insight of professionals working in fields closely related to what they have seen in their time in the UCP.
Connecting faith, service, and education through reflection rounds out the UCP. Through group discussion, students are invited to consider all that has happened – what they have seen, what they have heard, what they have felt – as they have been a part of the Program. They are called to awaken to: the intersection of their life with the lives of those in need, Christ’s call to respond to the needs of others, and the gifts and talents they possess that they might use in the service of that response.
UCP participants are expected to fully participate in all programming. There may be times when participants will feel uncomfortable or unsure of themselves: this is okay. We recognize that everyone has their own story and is at a different place on their journey. We also believe that through challenging ourselves to live “outside our comfort zones,” we open up to deepening our relationships with God, each other, and ourselves.
The UCP is available in overnight, weekend, and week-long formats. Please note that there may be multiple groups at the Romero Center at the same time. While groups will not be sleeping in the same rooms, they will likely be together for meals, large group reflection, at work sites, and for evening educational activities.