Loyola High School of Los Angeles Celebrates 150th Anniversary With Citywide Day Of Service

Loyola High School Celebrates 150th Anniversary With Citywide Day Of Service On April 11; 1000 Volunteers At 100 Community Projects To Give Back To Los Angeles Loyola High School of Los Angeles

Loyola High School Celebrates 150th Anniversary With Citywide Day Of Service On April 11; 1000 Volunteers At 100 Community Projects To Give Back To Los Angeles Loyola High School of Los Angeles

BY ISN STAFFApril 2, 2015

LOS ANGELES, CA – Loyola High School of Los Angeles, celebrating its 150th anniversary as the oldest continually operated educational institution in Southern California, recently announced that as a highlight of its yearlong Sesquicentennial commemoration, it is launching a historic community service initiative on Saturday, April 11, 2015. One thousand Loyola students, parents, faculty and alumni as well as students and teachers from area Catholic high schools will fan out across Los Angeles to work on 100 different service projects as a thank you to the Jesuit high school’s service partners that span the city.

“Community service has long been a hallmark of a Loyola education as we educate Men for Others in this great city.  Los Angeles has helped mold our students, encouraging them to learn the lessons necessary to become tomorrow’s compassionate leaders,” said Loyola President Fr. Gregory Goethals, S.J., ’73.  “From Long Beach to East LA to our own Pico Union neighborhood, the Sesquicentennial Day of Service is our heartfelt thank you to the City of Angels as we celebrate all that is Loyola High School.”

Based on the Corporal Works of Mercy (feed, clothe, shelter, counsel and teach), the Day of Service is far-reaching in its scope and range. Service projects will include area Catholic schools and shelters, public schools, hospitals, homes for battered women, veterans’ center, Skid Row missions, Hollywood youth centers as well as working in tandem with Habitat for Humanity, Big Sunday, the Archdiocese and the Southern California Special Olympics. Responsibilities will include food service, building repair, painting, care package preparation, landscaping and general spring cleaning.

“The Day of Service is a way for the Loyola community to express their gratitude to the people of the metropolitan area for how much they have given Loyola over 150 years,” said Tom Zeko, Loyola director of Community Service. “In December, we hosted the Father-Son Day of Service, which was an overwhelming success with more than 200 dads and sons reaching out to area organizations.  We’re using this amazingly energized day as our blueprint for our April 11th Day of Service.”

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Loyola High School of Los Angeles students at the 2012 Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice.

Loyola High School of Los Angeles is an institutional member and long-time partner of the Ignatian Solidarity Network.  In 2008, Loyola hosted ISN’s Spring Teach-In on Immigration Reform, welcoming over 300 Jesuit university and high school students to campus.  Each year Loyola sends a group of 15-20 students to the annual Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice, a nationwide Catholic social justice conference in Washington, D.C.

Celebrating its 150th anniversary as the oldest continually operated educational institution in Southern California, Loyola High School of Los Angeles launched a year-long, event- and initiative-driven commemoration of its past, present and future starting on November 16, 2014.   The academically rigorous Jesuit college preparatory is located just west of downtown Los Angeles and counts with more than 14,000 alumni.  Ninety-nine percent of Loyola graduates go on to college or university. Loyola’s student body of 1,255 young men represents a remarkable geographic diversity, drawing on 220 zip codes from throughout and beyond Los Angeles County.  The school is also ethnically diverse with 48 percent of the student body of Latino, Asian-Pacific or African-American descent. To enable students to achieve the goal of being “men for others,” Loyola students must complete at least 150 hours of community service work before graduation.  Over the past two decades, Loyola students have donated more than 1.3 million hours of community service, primarily to inner-city schools, neighborhoods and agencies.

[SOURCE: Loyola High School of Los Angeles]

 

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