About The Center

Welcome to the Center for Social Concerns (CSC) of the University of Notre Dame.

We are the service and community-based learning center of the University of Notre Dame. We provide educational experiences in social concerns inspired by Gospel values and Catholic social tradition. In as much, we invite students, faculty, staff and alumni to think critically about today’s complex social realities and about their responsibilities within them. The Center does this in collaboration with academic departments throughout the University as it sends students out into various service and experiential learning placements. With increasing faculty involvement, the Center is expanding the forum where Catholic social teaching can intersect with all the forms of knowledge found in the arts, sciences, professions, and other areas of scholarship.

This discussion is enhanced through a network of community-based learning opportunities that impressively connects our students with the wider Church. In our local, national and international seminars, our students work alongside missioners from the Congregation of Holy Cross, Maryknoll, Glenmary, the Dominicans, Jesuits, Franciscans, Sisters of Charity and more. We collaborate with L’Arche, the Catholic Worker movement, the U.S. Catholic Conference, the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, the National Catholic Conference of Bishops, numerous dioceses and parishes and many other groups inspired by and committed to the work of the Church and the Gospel.

In it all, the Center for Social Concerns strives to embody the University of Notre Dame’s effort "to create a sense of human solidarity and concern for the common good that will bear fruit as learning becomes service to justice" (from Notre Dame’s Mission Statement).

Thank you for visiting our website! Please take an even closer look at who we are and what we do! I hope your visit here can convey some of the energy and passion that we have and share with so many others. Please join us in our Gospel mission that calls us all "to service and action for a more just and humane world."

Sincerely, Fr. Bill

William M. Lies, C.S.C.

The Leo and Arlene Hawk Director of the Center for Social Concerns