Get Involved

CRS offers numerous programs to involve youth. Get your students to hold a 24-hour fast for hunger awareness, sell fair trade chocolate, build cyber bridges with youth overseas, or participate in CRS' Lenten program Operation Rice Bowl. Our educational initiatives, like "Sudan: Remember, Responding and Rebuilding," aim to increase awareness around specific issues or realities and offer creative avenues through which young people can become directly involved in efforts that help the poor around the world. Find out more about these and other CRS programs!

Get your students involved in CRS' legislative & advocacy campaigns and help them to see that they CAN make a difference! Catholic Relief Services' advocacy campaigns, like the Africa Rising Campaign, provide opportunities for U.S. Catholics to lobby the U.S. government for just policies. The campaigns are focused on issues that consider the preferential option for the poor. Informed by CRS' presence in the field, CRS' campaigns empower U.S. Catholics with knowledge about current issues and speakers from the field and the opportunity to respond to action alerts concerning current Congressional legislation. U.S. Catholics may speak for our brothers and sisters across the world.

CRS Programs & Outreach

Food Fast

Challenge the youth in your parish or school to help end global hunger through Food Fast, CRS ’ 24-hour hunger awareness program for U.S. Catholic youth in grades 8-12. With a focus on global poverty and justice, Food Fast provides an experience of faith that celebrates Roman Catholic traditions; an experience of solidarity with our brothers and sisters around the world who are living in hunger and poverty; and an experience of community, working together to create lasting change in the world.

To learn more, and to order your FREE materials for your youth group, visit our new interactive website at www.foodfast.org or call (800) 222-0025.

CRS Economic Justice Program

CRS currently promotes fair trade coffee, chocolate and handcrafts. Still learning about Fair Trade? Need materials to help educate youth about how Fair Trade can make the world a better place? Visit www.CRSfairtrade.org to order free Fair Trade educational resources, or download them directly from your computer.

Operation Rice Bowl

For over 30 years, Operation Rice Bowl has been bringing families, parishes, schools and other faith communities together during the Lenten Season to pray, fast, learn and give. Operation Rice Bowl challenges us to put our faith into action and walk in solidarity with our neighbors in need all around the world. In addition to the Rice Bowl itself, educational resources include a Home Calendar Guide, video and an Educator's Guide with lesson plans and classroom activities broken down by grade level. A new resource for Lent includes an interactive participation chart, suitable for display in schools.

To learn more or to order free bilingual materials visit www.crs.org/orb.

Cyber Bridges

Cyber Bridges is a journey of discovery leading to cultural understanding and global youth leadership between US Catholic secondary students and youth in selected countries throughout the CRS world. Employing information technology as one of the links, participants engage in dialogue, information sharing, collaborative activities, training and projects that work towards a shared vision of social justice and peace. Cyber Bridges is envisioned as providing the catalyst to lasting partnerships and expanded knowledge between American Catholic youth and marginalized overseas youth. Cyber Bridges provides the template for establishing exchanges where participants fill in the content, customizing each partnership to fit their unique realities.

CRS Campus Connection

If you work with young people who are headed off to college soon, direct them to the CRS Campus Connection. This is the place to find CRS activities and resources specifically geared towards college students, campus ministers, faculty and staff. Through education, action and prayer, CRS connects campuses across the country with our global community. CRS Campus Connection: where campus action gets global results.

Rebuilding Hope After the Tsunami

It will take years to restore what the tsunami destroyed in minutes, but we are committed to working side-by-side with tsunami survivors as they persevere in faith and in hope.

Sudan: Remembering, Responding, Rebuilding

The conflict in Darfur, Sudan has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, displaced millions of people and caused great suffering and turmoil. Help CRS to: stop the violence, provide the aid, and resolve the conflict.

CRS Campaigns

Africa Rising, Hope and Healing!

Through our campaign Africa Rising, Hope and Healing, Catholic Relief Services invites Catholics in the United States to engage in prayer, dialogue and advocacy around pressing issues facing the people of Africa. We hope that our Africa Campaign will provide an opportunity to heed the call of our bishops to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Africa and to put our faith into action.

The Solidarity with Africa education and prayer resource contains everything you need to run a program advocating for the needs of Africa. This can be used in conjunction with the Africa Rising Video.

Catholic Campaign Against Global Poverty

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) invite Catholics throughout the United States to join the Catholic Campaign Against Global Poverty as we advocate for U.S. policies that foster economic and social development for people living in poverty throughout the world. The campaign focuses on three areas of U.S. economic policy: shaping U.S. trade policies so that overcoming poverty and promoting human development are central priorities; supporting effective programs that foster long-term development and empowerment of the poor; and eliminating the debt of the poorest countries in ways that reduce poverty and promote human dignity.

Justice for Immigrants

Justice for Immigrants: A Journey of Hope campaign is designed to unite and mobilize a growing network of Catholic institutions, individuals, and other persons of good faith in support of a broad legalization program and comprehensive immigration reform. Its goal will be to maximize the Church's influence on this issue, consistent with the immigration reform principles enunciated in the bishops' pastoral letter. The principles included in the letter were: a broad-based legalization (permanent residency) of the undocumented of all nationalities; reform of our family-based immigration system to allow family members to reunite with loved ones in the United States; reform of the employment-based immigration system to provide legal pathways for migrants to come and work in a safe, humane and orderly manner; abandonment of the border "blockade" enforcement strategy; and restoration of due process protections for immigrants.

Peace in the Holy Land

The Catholic Campaign for Peace in the Holy Land is part of an unprecedented interreligious initiative. This initiative engages Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious leaders and communities in a coordinated effort to promote a just peace in the Middle East. The Catholic Campaign builds upon and complements the ongoing efforts of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to pursue a just peace. You Can Join The Call For A Just Peace.