And love has shined and burned in the Order of the Holy Cross since its founding in two important ways. One is among the poor. The Order began its life working among poor immigrants on New York City’s Lower East Side. The other is in education. The Order of the Holy Cross founded St. Andrew’s-Sewanee in Tennessee in 1905 and the Kent School in Connecticut in 1906 to provide educational opportunities for poor children. The mission of those schools has changed over the years, but they remain educational institutions of excellence.

From the United States, the Order expanded its educational mission to Liberia. That resulted in St. Agnes’ Primary School and St. Augustine’s High School in Boulahun. St. Agnes’ was devastated during the country’s civil war but has been restored. Both schools are still at work today.

From Liberia, the Order moved to Ghana and engaged education at St. Nicholas Seminary in Cape Coast since its inception in 1976. That engagement continues today. 

That legacy finds its logical extension at Holy Cross School in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), South Africa, opened by the monks of the uMariya uMama weThemba Monastery in 2010 as part of its ministry. Love Must Act began a partnership with the Order to manage and support Holy Cross School in 2017.

The commitment to partnership and relationship is what makes us unique. Many other groups with similar goals raise money to build schools. That is well and good, but we believe true change comes from relationships, so we build partnerships of mutual respect, caring, and giving first. Our method is creating partnerships between those with an abundance of material resources and those who lack them but have other gifts to offer because we believe human beings are transformed for good only in relationships with others. We believe successful efforts to address poverty, and to transform ourselves, must be rooted in relationships of solidarity with people who are poor.  Everything turns on relationship.

Sustainable education is education that fully serves the needs of a resource-poor community without compromising the ability of future generations in that community to meet their needs. Initial outside investment is just that - investment - and is designed to enable the local community to sustain the project in the long run through its own human and material resources. This distinguishes it from charity, which requires continual outside resources and may never allow the community to gain its own traction against the cycle of poverty.

We sometimes refer to sustainable education by another term we learned in our work in South Africa: “pro-poor” education. The South African government, other schools like ours, and the educational associations we are part of use the term to describe institutions whose mission and method are driven by the comprehensive needs of poor communities and are designed to serve as catalysts to those communities' long-term flourishing.  We find the term has a powerful ability to engage our minds and our hearts. Indeed, it engages our spirits. It helps us ask the right questions of ourselves. It inspires us to connect with what is beyond us and what calls out the best in us by loving those who are poor. For us, it connects us to Jesus, who identified himself with the poor and insisted that he could be encountered incarnationally in their service.