By Kristina White B’17

During Presidents’ Day weekend, on Friday, Feb. 13, Bellarmine students Joe Maiocco (’17), Kathy Nguyen (’17), Tiffany Sung (’17), Elizabeth Yi (’15), and I traveled with religion teacher Alison Scanlin to Los Gatos, CA for the 3-Day Arrupe Leaders Summit which focused on social justice.

There we learned about self-awareness, offering ideas, challenging the process and encouraging others to act as a part of making change happen.

We learned the world will repeatedly break our hearts as we challenge injustices, yet we will be surprised by all of the amazing things people do to challenge these injustices and make our world better. We learned leadership is over-glorified; it is really the first followers who make a movement, as it takes courage to be the first one stand up with others who are trying to make change happen.

These first followers set the example for others to join the movement. Further,
we had the opportunity to meet and be inspired by other Jesuit high school students who share our passion for justice and engage in a little friendly competition geared to teach us important skills for working for change.

One of the most influential parts of the summit was the Social Justice Round Robin.
Bellarmine was paired up with Seattle Prep to discuss social justice at our respective schools.

We were extremely impressed with Seattle Prep’s work, especially with their Global Justice Coalition, which has successfully made the school’s team uniforms sweatshop- free as well as prohibited the use of plastic water bottles.

When each school was given the chance to make an action plan, Bellarmine took a cue
from Seattle Prep. We made a goal to limit the use of and hopefully one day ban single use plastic on the hill. We are greatly looking forward to putting what we learned in action and hope for the participation of the student body.