Social Work
The spiritual and missionary aspect of the school has been maintained, despite the worldwide decline of new clerics in the Catholic Church. Many charitable causes are supported by the students; most notably the Transition year organises the annual St. Patrick's Day Badge appeal which raises large sums of money throughout Ireland for the Irish charities GOAL and Aidlink. The St. Patrick's Day project is estimated to have raised over € 5,000,000 for charity, raising over € 220,000 in 2005 alone.
The school also has a long-standing relationship with The Society of St. Vincent de Paul, contributing large sums of money raised through various projects. For example, the proceeds of the annual sale of Christmas Trees in the college are donated. In 2007, the Christmas Tree project raised € 93,000 and the total amount raised for the Society in that year is estimated to be in excess of € 150,000.
The College supports humanitarian projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, mainly through the college's cycling club, the Willow Wheelers. In 2006, their annual sponsored 160 km (99 mi) cycle raised in excess of € 60,000. The club also annually sends a group of self-funded volunteers to help with humanitarian projects in Africa, most commonly: establishing clean water supplies for villages and constructing schoolhouses/infirmaries or similar institutions.
Bob Geldof, initiator of the Band Aid and Live Aid movements for famine relief in the 1980s, was a student at the college (however, he was bitterly critical of it and in fact left without any qualifications). Frank Duff, the founder of the Legion of Mary, the Catholic lay movement, is also a past pupil. In his memoirs, Straight Left: A Journey in Politics Ruairi Quinn cites the ethos and "sense of solidarity" with the Third World that was imparted to students, including Bob Geldof, as a formative force. The Holy Ghost Fathers were (and remain) an active missionary order in Africa. He wrote:
-
- The poverty of distant Africa was brought into our classrooms by our returned missionary teachers.
-
- —Ruairi Quinn, Straight Left, pg. 36
Read more about this topic: Blackrock College
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or work:
“... as women become free, economic, social factors, so becomes possible the full social combination of individuals in collective industry. With such freedom, such independence, such wider union, becomes possible also a union between man and woman such as the world has long dreamed of in vain.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
“We have not the motive to prepare ourselves for a “life-work” of teaching, of social work—we know that we would lay it down with hallelujah in the height of our success, to make a home for the right man. And all the time in the background of our consciousness rings the warning that perhaps the right man will never come. A great love is given to very few. Perhaps this make-shift time filler of a job is our life work after all.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)