McIree learned that directly serving some of the poorest people in America had challenges you don’t encounter unless you’re physically in this space. There were men and women barely recognizable as human underneath piles of ragged clothing. There was the smell of men and women, some unwashed for months, who arrived wearing jeans stiff with dried urine that day-center staff would help peel off and replace. Many in the day-center crowd were severely mentally ill and unmedicated, their behavior unpredictable, and others had assault histories. A homeless former Army Ranger once, without warning, grabbed McIlree around the neck and placed him in a choke hold before releasing him a moment later.

“One day a fight broke out between two of the guys at the day center and one stabbed the other with a screwdriver before running off. The guy who got stabbed rather than wait for EMTs stumbled off towards the hospital near my house.” After getting off work, and while walking home, ”I followed a trail of this man’s dried blood on the sidewalk for blocks.” It made for the kind of reflection on the violence of poverty you’re not likely to experience unless you’re involved directly in a poor community.

At the same time, the service had its rewards. “On my days off I would go to Dunkin’ Donuts and my homeless friends would be there hanging out, and not realizing it was my day off they would run up wanting to talk about whatever issues they were having. It went beyond a typical job.” McIlree found it impossible to walk around Center City Philadelphia in his free time without running into people living on the streets who he knew.

This was the crucial experience, for McIlree: Somewhere along the way, those that he served stopped being “the homeless,” the conceptual, faceless mass that most Americans see when looking at society’s most disadvantaged. The homeless had become people, individuals whose names he knew and life stories he had learned.

It’s this message of direct contact with the needy that many are seeing emphasized by the new pope—in his inviting homeless men to his birthday party, in washing the feet of prisoners at a youth detention center, or lovingly cradling the head of a severely disfigured man he saw on the street. His idea of poverty fighting involves sneaking out of the Vatican at night to serve homeless people in person.

Katie Dorner graduated from Gonzaga University, a Jesuit college in Spokane, Washington, last May, and set out for her JVC placement at the Dolores Mission Parish in East Los Angeles in August. She says she knew she wanted to be a JV from her freshman year in college. She now serves as a youth minister at the Catholic elementary school where she says her daily duties involve creating safe spaces for youth in an often violent community where families can be torn apart by deportation. “It’s hard to be around a child whose father was sent away because of immigration policy,” she says.