A Year in Montana: Great Falls, MT

Just got back from our JVC Northwest winter retreat in Great Falls, MT. It was a wonderful weekend with a wonderful group of people. The theme of this retreat was social justice (each retreat focuses on one of the four JVC Northwest values- so last one was community, this one was social justice.) Our facilitator was the director/founder of Hopa Mountain, an awesome nonprofit out of Bozeman that "invests in rural and tribal citizen leaders who are working to improve education, ecological health, and economic development in their hometowns."

A group photo taken from Sarah's camera. That old man in the middle is George from the Ursuline Center (see below why he's the greatest!)

Each community had the chance to dream & design small changes that can make a big difference, in our service, our schools, our communities. A main point was to avoid deficit thinking- focusing on the 'problems' that need 'fixing'- and instead looking at the strengths of a place or situation and imagining what 'could be.' Here in St. Xavier, us JVs are going to be focusing this last half on integrating the value of stewardship into the culture of Pretty Eagle, based on the school's strong commitment to living out Catholic and traditional Crow beliefs and values. It was a great time of re-orientation, in general, a re-planting into the four values of JVC and how we hope to continue to grow this year. And, overall, just a lovely weekend!

The Ursuline Center was a fabulous, huge old building. When Mother Raphael was living she had a beautiful art studio in the central tower (which they have preserved as part of the history of the building.) We got to go out onto the roof from the art studio which was pretty neat.

The lovely Hays ladies posing by the tower.

What a space for a studio!

The man speaking to the group is George Di Giorgio, resident caretaker of the Ursuline Center. He gave us a tour of the building and the little museum parts. He also has some of the most incredible stories any of us had ever heard- like building a sailboat to escape his home of Chile during political unrest, joining an expedition to Antarctica at 17 where their boat got frozen in and trapped for a year, leading the Canadian syncronized swimming team to an Olympic gold medal (that one was by accident), being in 3 movies and dating movie star Stefanie Powers, and my favorite, going to rescue a boat by a small island near Fiji, I think?, unknowingly marrying a girl from the island, and then tricking her to go back to the island and nullifying the marriage. Ha! These among many, many more that we had the joy of hearing from him. Now, as he told PBS when they wanted him to come out to Manhattan to interview him for a documentary on the Antarctica expedition and he said no- "I'm old, I've lived here for 8 years, I'm practically a nun." (So they came to him. The episode should be out by summer.) Oh, the people you meet!