News Post

A group of St. Joseph’s Academy students traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, to participate in the 2025 Alive in You service immersion program. The trip took place June 24-29.

Alive in You camps strive to enable participants to open their hearts and allow Christ to become the center of their lives. The program, grounded in the beliefs and teachings of the Catholic Church, seeks to provide a balance of faith, service, education and fun and enable participants to return home with a practical sense of how to live their faith. 

Trip chaperones were Campus Minister Chelsea Colomb and Laurie Rozas of the SJA finance office. 

SJA students were joined in Nashville by 10 other groups from several states. Each day began with mass before participants were sent out to various service sites. SJA’s worksite was the Mercy Chefs Nashville Community Kitchen, founded in 2021 as a disaster relief organization. Since then, organizers realized that between disasters, there are still hungry local families who need help. Mercy Chefs has served more than 15,000 hot, chef-prepared meals. 

SJA students spent their mornings helping prepare and plate meals to be delivered to shelters, a safe haven house, veterans’ home, children’s summer camp and organizations that go into the streets to feed the homeless.

“It was a gift for our students to be able to pray and grow in their faith alongside teens from other places and experience the larger church community,” Colomb said. “I hope they were able to encounter God in many places and have a new experience of their faith. I hope they recognized they are not alone in their faith and there are others just like them striving to walk with Jesus in their journey to be disciples.”

The group also visited the St. Cecilia Motherhouse of the Nashville Dominicans and did volunteer work at the Adventure Science Center, helping employees prepare for a community event. 

“I hope the girls took away that God will always be there for them and to continue seeking what God has planned for their lives,” Rozas said. 

Sophomore Maryn Mayeux said helping prepare meals for the homeless was especially meaningful. “We got to see how much it impacted their lives,” she said. “I felt God guiding us when we fed the homeless on the street.”

Senior Katherine McCann said the trip brought her closer to God and helped her focus on what is truly important in life. “I felt God’s presence when we were working to feed the hungry,” she said. “It felt like we were in that moment to help those people who needed it.”

Sophomore Laina Messina said she is very glad she went on the mission trip. “It was definitely something I’ve never experienced before,” she said. “It gave me a huge chance to grow in my relationship with God and my faith.”