Feb 2, 2017 By Harry Funk 5 min read

Winter break at Pleasant Valley might seem like an ideal situation for a college student.

And so it was, but not for the reasons you’d think.

For a group of 10 students from the University of Notre Dame and nearby St. Mary’s College, an overnight stay at the Pleasant Valley Men’s Shelter on the North Side was a component of their participation in last month’s Pittsburgh Urban Plunge.

Offered through Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns, the Urban Plunge program gives undergraduates a firsthand look at the challenges faced by major cities throughout the United States. Among those taking part last month locally, sponsored by the Notre Dame Club of Pittsburgh, were three recent Mt. Lebanon High School graduates.

“I did a lot of volunteer work in high school, but I never really got face-to-face time with people experiencing the issues of urban poverty and homelessness,” Notre Dame freshman Fabi Shipley said. “And so I wanted to see the other side of the city and see the needs that are there, because I hope to one day move back and be able to give back to the community.”

Shipley, co-president of the Mt. Lebanon Class of 2016, joined the other Urban Plunge students in visiting a dozen service sites operated by nonprofit groups.

“That really gave me an appreciation for how giving our city is,” she said. “But the other side of that is how much need there is, and no matter how many organizations there are, they’re always struggling to get the resources they need, and there always will be more people who need help.”

Gaining similar perspective was Claire Marie Kuhn, a Notre Dame sophomore and 2015 Mt. Lebanon graduate.

“When I met a lot of less-privileged people at these various organizations, the greatest thing you can learn is that they’re just like us,” Kuhn said, “and they should be treated with the same respect and human dignity that we get.”

Their stories can offer surprises, as St. Mary’s freshman Kayla Powers learned.

“There’s often a stereotype that they’re not educated, that they don’t have loving families,” the 2016 Mt. Lebanon graduate explained. “I found that a lot of people I talked to actually had that. Some type of mental illness or some situation caught them off guard and really caused them to spiral.”

The students had ample opportunity to speak with the men staying at Pleasant Valley, which is operated by Northside Common Ministries.

“A lot of them had a lot of hope,” Powers said. “Their family life was better than you would have expected. A lot of them were there because they wanted to be independent and self-sufficient. They didn’t want to have to rely on their families. So I was very surprised to find that.”

Kuhn found the interaction to be especially rewarding.

“I used to be a French major, so I speak decent French. And one of the men there was actually from France. And he said he hadn’t talked to someone who spoke French in two years. He told me his story of why he ended up in Pittsburgh and why he’d come to the U.S. in the first place,” she said. “That was interesting.”

While Kuhn also sensed a degree of optimism at the shelter – one of the men with whom she spoke had just gotten a job – she related a conversation another student had with a man who had been to jail.

“He basically said, ‘Sometimes I wish that I could go back to jail, because there’s always something to do there. There’s always food and shelter.’ So that was very eye-opening and shocking. You would never think that anyone would want to go to jail again.”

For Shipley, a particularly eye-opening experience was visiting Focus On Renewal’s Sto-Rox Neighborhood Family Health Center in McKees Rocks, where her mother’s family lived when the borough was thriving.

“To see, now, the differences, how poor the town is, how there really just aren’t any job opportunities and people are just sort of stuck: It was really sort of sad to see, and made me think about how that’s a region that really could use our help,” she said.

As far as her own contributions on behalf of others, she takes a cue from her parents.

“Although their jobs aren’t directly working for nonprofits, they serve on a lot of the boards,” Shipley said. “They go to the events. They volunteer. You can be committed and be involved in so many different capacities.”

Kuhn used an analogy to describe her plans for involvement.

“There’s trash flowing down the river. You can pick it up out of the river, or you can go upriver and plug the hole where the trash is coming from,” she said.

“I’ve always thought of myself as more of the person who would go upriver.”