2026 Lent Appeal: Magnifying St. Julie

Deep in Appalachia, with snow in the hollows and the bare trees riding the ridgelines, there have been Notre Dame Mission Volunteers side by side with children, an open book before them and the larger world rising up like a hologram.

In our cities, there have been Notre Dame Live The Good Volunteers packing lunches for people who are hungry, gathering books for children without them, serving food, sorting clothing.

At Mount Notre Dame, Notre Dame Associates and volunteers push the wheelchairs of our elderly Sisters into the sunshine, enabling our Sisters to participate in meaningful activities.

And in neighborhoods of poverty and homelessness, volunteers tutor, mentor and serve as role models for young people who to date have had few to none.

The geography of Notre Dame is vast, and its volunteers are from all over the country, and from all backgrounds. But in common there is this: the Notre Dame mission of giving people what they need for life.

Lewis Carroll, who you may remember from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, wrote: “One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.”

Of our thousands of Mission Volunteers, Live The Good Volunteers, Associates and volunteers of all stripes – few of them may have read or heard this, but in their hearts they know it, and act on it. You can see it in the stories they tell and the letters they write. There is such joy in the sacrifice of their service. In some instances – especially for younger volunteers – it sets the tone, determines the path, of their future lives.

As you’re reading this, there are young people re-routed away from social injustices in our society because a Notre Dame Mission Volunteer, through his or her presence, provided an off-ramp into constructive ways of living. There are working, middleclass adults who in their impoverished youth avoided violent groups, theft and drugs by instead finding refuge in after-school programs staffed by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. There are adults with disabilities, once siloed in loneliness, who through the work of volunteers are connected to employment and friendship.

There is homelessness avoided, food pantries staffed, after-school tutoring, companionship with the elderly – because of our volunteers. They are true magnifiers of Saint Julie, and of the work she so believed in. Our Sisters often say that where one Sister is, we all are. It’s likewise true that wherever our volunteers are, there too are our Sisters, and there too are those who support us.

I hope this Lent that through a financial sacrifice you can partner with us and our volunteers wherever and however they serve. I hope so not only for the volunteers themselves but for the many people they help, whether in snowy mountain hollows, the streets of our inner-cities, in social service agencies or in the halls of our own Mount Notre Dame convent.

An enormous amount of work is getting done, an enormous amount of good – and with your partnership we will keep it that way.

Sincerely,

Sister Donna Wisowaty, SNDdeN
Provincial

P.S. The Sisters receive no support from any diocese or archdiocese. All we do is made possible by our friends and former students.