2021: La Casa de la Solidaridad

La Casa de la Solidaridad

Casa was the brainchild of Dean Brackley, one of the Jesuit priests who came to El Salvador to help take the places of the six Jesuits murdered by the Salvadoran army in 1989.

When Dean died of cancer in 2011, the program had been up and running for twelve years. As Jesuit Fr. Steve Privett, the former president of the University of San Francisco, said in his homily at the memorial liturgy for Dean,

Dean and I first became friends when we conspired together to establish Casa.  He was the passionate visionary in the trenches and I, the stateside advocate. 

In 1999, Dean and Steve hired Trena and Kevin to be the program’s co-directors. They held masters degrees in religious education from Boston College, and had worked in Belize with Jesuit Volunteers International. They guided and developed Casa at every step during its 19 years of existence.

The semester-long program, made available to students at Jesuit and other universities, had four pillars: accompaniment of the poor, rigorous academic study, living simply in community, and spirituality. Each of the students was placed with a poor, struggling community, and spent two full days there each week, sharing the lives of the people who lived there. Some of the communities were in San Salvador; others were in the countryside. 

Casa came to be recognized as an effective and innovative educational model. Hundreds of university students — 700 from the U.S. and 65 from El Salvador — took part, working in 16 communities and making hundreds of homestays in Chalatenango province. Others were part of a summer-long health-focused program, and worked in six health clinics.

Many students have said that the Casa experience marked a turning point in their lives. One U.S. student said, “In order to accompany the Salvadorans, I had to learn about their spirituality . . . [and]I had to live simply so that I could better understand how they live… Most importantly, I had to learn what it means to be in a community. Salvadoran culture is very community-centric, and I would not have been able to see the beauty in how they form communities without being a part of the Casa community myself.” 

Another student said, “Living in community taught me the importance of supporting one another through challenging and grace-filled experiences. I learned that if I am serious about committing to a life of accompaniment of the poor and faith, I cannot go the road alone. Since returning from Casa, I have sought out or created intentional community in one way or another.”