Director of Immersion, Loyola Marymount University

>> My name is Patrick Furlong [phonetic] and I direct Emergent [phonetic] Experiences for Campus Ministry at Little [inaudible] University [phonetic] where I spend at least a couple weekends a month down in Tijuana doing some service and social justice work there with students, and then spend time throughout the world really. So from Kenya to Ecuador, to you name it, we take students and go through those alternative [inaudible] type programs and those emergent experiences. Then when I'm not doing that, I'm back on campus or kind of working here in L.A. So Pico-Union, Boyle Heights, Watts, taking students into those communities, kind of those communities on the margins, and giving them an opportunity to learn a little bit more about what opportunities exist in social justice in that area. Usually do about three trips that are longer -- that are one to three weeks. And I'll be on one kind of over winter break, one over spring break, one over summer break. And so that's the extent of it. When I'm not there, part of it is again, working in local communities like Boyle Heights or Watts or Pico-Union, but the real big part of it, and that's really kind of where my degree came in to help me with it, is geared administrating our programs. So you spend a lot of time doing program management. Kind of creating leadership tools for the students that are leading these trips, doing the budgeting, figuring out everything else in between that. And what we see this as is not necessarily a service trip, right? We don't think someone's going to go in and in one week, make this grand impact that's going to change a community. And so for us, our hope is, students go and they get exposed to maybe a world that they're weren't aware existed or they knew existed but they had never really experienced it firsthand. And you kind of meet the world in that nitty-gritty reality. And from there you hope that there's some thought changes that happen. The students come back to the United States and they begin to think, "Okay, what am I called to do? Who do I want to be? What am I looking to do with my career and how does that impact those people that live on the margins? And how can I make a positive impact to really try to change what I've seen there?" So that's the hope is just to kind of give a little dabble of experience so that people come back and think long-term about how they're going to live their lives out.