Loyola University Chicago

Loyola University Chicago was founded in 1870 by a group of Jesuit priests and brothers on the near west side of Chicago.  Inspired by their own formational experiences in the Society of Jesus, these founders dreamed of providing an academically rigorous, faith-based university education that would, in the words of St. Ignatius Loyola, challenge students to “conceive great resolves and elicit equally great desires.”

137 years later Loyola University Chicago is realizing their founders’ dream.  They experience Loyola as a place where they can explore and engage their deep spiritual, academic, and professional longings.  They understand that the university supports their desires to connect faith, study, and career.  And they appreciate that Loyola values their resolve to live out their unique callings as extraordinary men and women for others.

I. How Evoke Was Born (2000)
II. Evoke's Successes (2000-2004)
III. What We've Learned
IV. Evoke Today (2005-2008)

How Evoke Was Born (2000)

In our original PTEV application to the Lilly Endowment in 2000, we stressed that although vocation had always been central to the mission of Loyola University Chicago, its overall importance had waned in recent years.  We hoped to receive a PTEV grant both to “strengthen the focus” of existing vocational activities at Loyola and to create new initiatives that would “increase the visibility” of call on campus.  Our “great resolve” was to “further accentuate” our founders’ intentions “to shape an institutional culture that valorizes vocation.”

We described Evoke’s “overarching purpose” as one of “helping Loyolans of all religious traditions to explore, engage, and deepen their commitments to leading and serving others in faith-motivated ways.”  We noted that while Evoke would serve multiple constituents, it would concentrate on sharing the message of vocation with students and the faculty and staff who teach, advise, and mentor them. In keeping with the Ignatian spirit, Evoke has worked diligently to realize the following goals:

For the university:

• To strengthen Loyola’s institutional focus on vocation on campus, creating a supportive climate that is welcoming of dialogue about and deeds that arise from personal call or vocation

For students, faculty and staff: To develop a growing number of programs, initiatives, and policies that:

• Enhance their awareness and understandings of the theme of vocation in their lives;
• Encourage students to make informed life and career choices from a sense of personal call;
• Invite students, faculty, and staff to explore how their faith commitments relate to vocation; and
• Support faculty and staff efforts to incorporate knowledge on vocation into their professional work with students, particularly through the development of new or revised courses and a focused emphasis on vocation in academic advising, career counseling, and other relevant co-curricular programming.

For alumni and the broader community: To develop outreach efforts that invite members of these groups to explore and, if they so chose, to consider the theme of vocation more purposively in their life and career choices.

Evoke's Success (2000-2004)

How well has Evoke accomplished its originally stated goals?  While our evaluation found that all of Evoke’s original goals were attained to varying degrees of success, it also made clear that meaningful cultural and individual change is often slow, demanding work that requires vigilant attention and sustained momentum. 

In terms of the first goal, Evoke has begun to affect a cultural shift on campus.  Not only has it brought vocation more sharply into focus as a central feature of the university’s mission, it has helped to nurture a climate that is more accepting of – and comfortable with – “call language” and “ideas” on campus. 

These results suggest that Evoke has begun to generate an “institutional wake up call” about vocation, raising awareness of and strengthening the university’s focus on vocation.  Similarly, there appears to be a growing desire for vocation-related programming on campus.  While both of these outcomes signal changes in the culture, we are very cognizant that the overwhelming majority of our students will eventually leave the university.  If Loyola is to become an institution that “valorizes vocation,” it must continue to keep discussions of vocation fresh for each new class of students it serves, as well as extend and deepen the circle of faculty and staff who are familiar with and supportive of its value.

Evoke’s second goal has also been largely achieved.  Our summative evaluation, for instance, found that the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff surveyed between 2001 and 2004 strongly agreed or agreed that Evoke had enhanced their general awareness of vocation.  Similarly, four of every five respondents strongly agreed or agreed that Evoke had helped them to “think differently about” their career and life choices.  

Evoke has also found some success in attracting faculty and staff to integrate the theme of vocation into the curriculum.  Between 2001 and 2005, for example, more than 40 sections of Evoke-sponsored courses had been offered, and most to very positive reviews  Evoke has also partnered successfully with several departments of campus – including the career center, university ministry, and undergraduate academic advising – to weave the theme of vocation into their programs and practices with students.

Evoke’s “bigger story” may well go beyond its intended outcomes, however.  In conducting our summative evaluation, we identified five unintended outcomes that have resulted from Evoke’s efforts on campus.  Each has meaningfully enriched the overall culture and mission of Loyola University Chicago in unanticipated ways.

Evoke has helped to create “mentoring communities” on campus that have enriched the lives of students, faculty, and staff in unforeseen ways.  Time and again, Loyolans told us that Evoke classes, workshops, retreats, the On Call undergraduate student immersion program, and the multi-day summer institute provided “safe places” where they felt free to explore questions of vocation, spirituality, and faith-inspired leadership.  Many described strong feelings of belonging and camaraderie in these communities.  And quite a few said that in these spaces they found the inspiration and support to make vocation an organizing principle in their lives and the lives of their students, staffs, and departments.

Our own evaluative efforts have helped us to see the catalyzing effect that Evoke has had on translating and clarifying the Jesuit mission of Loyola University Chicago.  We have been pleasantly surprised, for example, at how vocation – once personalized to the particulars of an individual’s concrete lived reality through self-examination – has prompted faculty, staff, and students to reflect on and make sense of the university’s “missioned calling.”

Evoke has emerged as an important resource as the university has reexamined its mission.  In October, 2003, Lucien Roy, the Executive Director of Evoke and Vice President for Mission and Ministry, was asked by Loyola’s president, Fr. Michael Garanzini, S.J., to co-chair the university’s “Mission and Vision” Task Force.  The charge?  To craft a succinct statement of the university’s mission that necessarily expressed its most cherished core values.  The final, two sentence mission statement included two ideas fundamental to Evoke’s work on campus: “seeking God in all things” and “putting learning at the service of humanity.”  The former captures the reality of God the Caller in all things, and the latter emphasizes the self-transcendent quality of any authentic vocation.  This new mission statement later influenced the development of the university’s promise of “preparing people to lead extraordinary lives.”  Today, the promise is translated to Loyolans in a variety of ways, but common to all of them is the conviction that prayerful reflection on one’s sense of purpose, or calling, is essential to living an extraordinary life.

As Evoke nears the end of its first five years at Loyola, we celebrate its achievements, but do not rest idly on them.  There is much work that awaits, and Evoke is eager to sustain and deepen what it has started.

Several of the programmatic initiatives Evoke implemented in its first year of operation have met with much success and are now fully integrated into various departments at Loyola.  These include:

• Retreats: Explore, Called to Church Ministry, Christian Leadership, and Ignatian Silent Directed (now administered through University Ministry);

• Workshops: including four housed in Evoke (Vocation and Ignatian Spirituality, Enneagram, Personal Mission Statement, Journaling and Vocation) and the remainder integrated into other units on campus (e.g., revised “Career and Self-Assessment” and “Making it in the Real World” workshops housed in Career Services; vocation-themed sessions in science, communication, and business “career weeks” housed in respective colleges; “To Be or Not to Be Pre-Med” workshop housed in pre-health advising office);

• The OnCall program, a year-long vocational exploration community for sophomores and juniors administered through Evoke.  [This program has been modified from a 3 year to a 1 year program]

What We've Learned

Perhaps not surprisingly, this category of activities generated some of Evoke’s most important lessons.   Here we learned that events, workshops, and retreats on call/vocation are most “fruitful” when they:

• Put a “human face” on vocation by featuring the “real world” call stories of others;
• Recognize that while everyone has a calling (and, often, multiple callings over a lifetime), also view vocation as a highly individualized and intimate construct;
• Challenge participants to stop, reflect, and think about their values and priorities;
• Include concrete, hands-on activities/exercises or discernment tools for thinking about and exploring vocation;
• Bring together diverse participants from across the university who share a genuine desire to dialogue about the mystery and journey of vocation;
• Create safe, supportive, and non-judgmental environments for exploring vocation that are premised on mutual respect, honest dialogue, and attentive listening; and
• More pragmatically, draw participants when they offer “incentives” for participation, such as  food, books, or discounted fees. 

Perhaps the most obvious “negative” lesson we have learned is that larger-scale, one-shot events are not sufficient in and of themselves to lead people to engage in meaningful vocational discernment.  To be sure, these events often have the potential to raise peoples’ awareness of vocation – and Evoke – on a broader scale, but smaller, more intimate gatherings – such as well-designed workshops and retreats – are necessary to ensure that “vocational questions” don’t get lost in the shuffle of people’s very busy and overscheduled lives. 

Our involvement in curricular activities has taught us several important lessons.  Among these is our growing knowledge that students have rich learning experience in vocation-infused courses that:

• Require students to read, hear, reflect on, and discuss the autobiographical and biographical “call stories” of others;
• Provide frequent opportunities for students to struggle with and think out loud about questions of vocation within supportive, non-judgmental, listening-oriented settings;
• Include fieldwork or service-learning experiences that allow students to discern their gifts and how they might best use them to serve others; and
• Stress journaling and theological reflection activities that challenge students to examine their deep desires, gifts, and joys; to relate these insights to their faith commitments; and to clarify what these insights might mean for their calling.

Evoke Today (2005-2008)

Evoke has learned many lessons over the past five years.  In planning for our future, we have taken these lessons to heart, using them to discern a vision and strategy for Evoke’s next three years of operation.  In this section, we lay out the general contours of this strategy, and provide a rationale for how it will help to sustain, strengthen and further extend Evoke at Loyola University Chicago. 

A well-positioned senior staff member in the university recently described Evoke in these terms: “Evoke has added practical value to the university by putting the mission into practice.  It has put meat on the bones of our faith-based mission. . . .  From my perspective, Evoke is a treasure.”  This person’s perspective on the “real value” Evoke has added to revitalizing the university’s 135 year old mission is shared by a growing number of Loyolans, from the president to members of its Board of Trustees, from several deans to a core group of committed faculty and staff members.  Evoke’s “great resolve” to challenge the university and its members to “wake up” to vocation has elicited greater interest in, dialogue about, and understandings of call on campus, bringing vocation more sharply into focus as a central feature of Loyola’s mission-based promise to “prepare people to lead extraordinary lives.”

Evoke’s activities over the next three years (2005-2008):

Goal 1: To promote and raise the visibility of vocation on campus;

Goal 2: To enrich core programming efforts that (1) support vocational exploration and clarification as well as (2) sustain and deepen existing vocational commitments among students, faculty, and staff;

Goal 3: To provide resources and training to assist new students, faculty, and staff in integrating vocational themes into their advising, mentoring, teaching, curricular, and leadership practices;

Goal 4: To deepen theological conversations on campus that promote ongoing dialogue and reflection on vocation and vocational discernment; and

Goal 5: To develop new vocational initiatives that focus specifically on preparing lay and ordained leaders for church ministry.

As Evoke considers its future, two primary long-term goals emerge.  Certainly, the first is to sustain Evoke as a unit on campus.  We believe this goal will be achieved if Evoke continues to build on its solid reputation as a unit that supports, embodies, and empowers others to live out the university’s promise and mission.   Second, Evoke has always had cultural change as its fundamental long-term goal.  We have made good progress on helping Loyola (and Loyolans) to see anew the centrality of vocation to the university’s mission (and its promise of “preparing people to lead extraordinary lives”).  But cultural change is almost always incremental, evolving over many years.  A long-term goal of Evoke’s is to continue to work toward affecting such a cultural shift, not only by introducing the language and ideas of vocation to each new entering class of students, faculty and staff, but also by partnering with others throughout the university to integrate vocation more fully into the curricular, co-curricular, and faculty/staff development systems on campus.  Eventually, as these partnerships mature and integration becomes normative, Evoke will put itself out of business.  Our own understandings of the work that remains to be done, however, suggests that reality may be many years away.

What strategy do we have in mind for achieving these long-term goals?  In keeping with what we have learned from Kezar and Eckel’s (2002) research on successful change initiatives in higher education, we know that we will need to be vigilant in our efforts to support Evoke systemically.  This means, concretely, that we must move our change effort forward on at least six fronts.  First, we must continue to secure strong symbolic, political, and financial support for Evoke from Loyola’s president and Board of Trustees. Without it, Evoke will have a short-lived history.  Second, we recognize the urgency of it is developing a long-term resource strategy for sustaining Evoke financially.  Evoke must partner with Advancement and be proactive in seeking out external sources of support to supplement the institutional support it receives.  Third, we are well aware of the need to articulate a clear vision and concrete goals for Evoke, being persistent and focused in our efforts to connect our vision and goals to the mission and promise of the university.  We also know that we must develop a logical organizational structure for the office and its leadership.. That said, we must also remain flexible in how we implement our vision and goals, constantly assessing our efforts and making adjustments as merited.  Fourth, we know how important it is to continue to build and sustain meaningful and productive partnerships.  Evoke is ultimately a resource unit on campus; it exists largely to help Loyola’s faculty and staff better "prepare people to lead extraordinary lives."  Fifth, we are deeply persuaded of the importance of ongoing staff and faculty development.  Without it, we will not have champions for Evoke on campus, nor will we have people who are excited about and understand the value of vocation-infused courses, advising, and programs on campus.  Finally, we realize that we must demonstrate publicly to our partners, leaders, and various publics that we are making good, solid progress on achieving our goals.  To make an impact on the culture of Loyola University Chicago, Evoke must tell its success stories, pointing out visibly to others where change is happening and how these changes are helping the university to realize more fully its mission and promise.

Located in the Division of Mission and Ministry, Evoke is poised to enter its next phase of development under the direction of a new Executive Director, a wise Vice President for Mission and Ministry, and with an energetic staff who are eager to achieve Evoke’s newly-articulated vision and goals.  We intend to maintain the many and varied partnerships we have developed with various academic and administrative units over the past years.  Of these, it is critical to sustain linkages with the Career Center, University Ministry, Student Life, Residence Life, the Institute for Pastoral Studies, and each of Loyola’s respective schools and colleges.  We hope to develop stronger relationships with the Center for Faculty Professional Development, Human Resources, the Provost’s Office, and the individual deans of each school and college as Evoke moves into the future.