To Pray, To Love and To Build

Provided by Stephen Snead,
Director of Development for St. Joseph the Worker College

How KCCF Donors Help Further the Mission of the College of St. Joseph the Worker

Our Mission Statement reads: The College of St. Joseph the Worker forms students into effective and committed members of their communities by teaching them the Catholic intellectual tradition while training them in skilled and dignified labor. We teach our students to think, but also to pray, to love and to build.

We are a completely new model of higher education that combines a Bachelor of Arts with a skilled trade. This is different from traditional higher education in two ways:

Students in the trades are paid to train, so they can work to pay their tuition and not take on any debt.
We believe the separation of “the head and the hands” in education is a false choice. The great buildings of Europe were built by people steeped in their Catholic Faith. If we want to build beautiful and lasting things in America again, we need to reunite knowledge of the faith and practical skills.

On a more practical level, there are over 600,000 job openings in the trades right now and three retirements for every new tradesman. The economy is also changing rapidly,and many young people are wondering about careers that are lasting (i.e., AI-proof).

From a Catholic perspective, the job opportunities in the trades offer another benefit — the pay is such that young people can get married and start families without spending their 20s and 30s paying off student loans and bouncing from one low paying job to the next in search of a career.

Restoring beauty in forgotten places

Our College is inextricably linked to our hometown, Steubenville, Ohio, which has suffered greatly as part of the general decline of the Rust Belt. Seventy-five percent of downtown buildings are boarded up. In the midst of this decline, the College is offering hope to Steubenville by purchasing old buildings and renovating them for academic buildings, trades instruction and student housing. As part of that effort, we purchased an abandoned lot and are turning it into a beautiful green space.

This project is the most significant thing to happen downtown in decades. It will transform our campus and our city by bringing beauty to a forgotten place.

This is not the only example of how living out our mission is transforming our hometown. We recently renovated an abandoned apartment building next door to St. Peter Church in downtown Steubenville. Those apartments are now beautiful housing for students.

The university was invented by Catholics in Europe. As many universities have lost their way or become so expensive that most people have to go into tremendous debt to attend, it's tempting to give up on the idea of college. Many young men, in particular, are skipping college. By bringing together the liberal and manual arts at a price any family can afford, we are bringing a new model of a Catholic institution into the higher education landscape, offering hope for young people and an example of how higher education can be reclaimed and reformed, not abandoned. Our students are learning a theology of building, and in the process, they’re striving to be saints.

The KCCF impact

Because we are a new institution, we have no alumni to support us, and we are unknown to most traditional funders. Donors such as those from KCCF help fund our mission to bring a new model of education to students without using loans.

Starting a college is no small undertaking. In this startup phase, we have to purchase and renovate buildings, and we cannot pass those costs on to students and families. We need donors to help build the College so that it serves students for generations to come and can be a model for how to create something new and distinctly Catholic while rebuilding the American heartland.

Our main academic building was an abandoned, former federal courthouse before we renovated it. It’s hard to describe what an impact this has on the town. I like to use the metaphor that when we do this for what is old, lost and abandoned, we are reflecting what the Lord does for souls: He makes all things new.

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