Calvin College continues to respond to the despair left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

On Friday, September 2 a special hurricane-response team met to discuss how best the Calvin community could address the suffering in the Gulf Coast region.

The college is planning a variety of initiatives.

The first will be Sunday, September 4 when the first on-campus worship service of the year takes place.

Called The LOFT (for Living Our Faith Together) that 8 pm service will bring literally a thousand or more students together in the Calvin Chapel.

There they will learn a little more about the latest on Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. And they also will have the chance to contribute money as a special offering will be taken for hurricane relief efforts.

All of the money raised that night (and in other planned fundraising efforts) will be split between the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee (CRWRC), a Christian Reformed Church agency that Calvin students assisted this weekend with phone bank work, and the American Red Cross.

Those two agencies were chosen because of some close Calvin connections to each partner. In fact, today, September 3, Calvin counselor Dan VanderSteen left for two weeks of counseling work in New Orleans on behalf of the Red Cross. And on September 17 Calvin's Robert Myers, an information technology specialist, will leave for the Gulf Coast for 10 days work on behalf of the CRWRC.

Calvin's Jeff Bouman, director of the school's Service-Learning Center, is heading up the response team and says those Calvin connections were important links for the school's fundraising efforts.

"We felt it was appropriate to put a human face on the two agencies that we're working with," says Bouman. "In Dan and Bob we have a couple of dedicated Calvin employees who are giving of their time and talents to assist the victims of Katrina. We hope that our faculty, staff and students will resonate with their efforts and support them and the agencies they're assisting."

In fact, during the two weeks from September 4 to September 18 the college will engage in a targeted fundraising effort.

In addition to the September 4 LOFT service offering there will be another special offering for hurricane relief at the September 11 LOFT service on campus (that service also will focus on a Christian response to human tragedies like Hurricane Katrina). Calvin also will set up collection boxes around its campus and its Student Senate will not only coordinate further fundraising and consciousness-raising efforts for students, but also will donate a percentage of the proceeds from its annual used book sale to the Calvin fundraising effort.

Bouman says the fundraising is an important immediate response to the tragedy.

But he thinks that Calvin also needs to remember the long-term needs of the people on the Gulf Coast and think about the bigger questions of human suffering and a Christian's response to it.

To that end the response team at Calvin is not only planning to focus the September 11 worship service on that topic, but also is planning some educational activities, including a panel discussion in mid- to late-September that would involve VanderSteen and other Calvin faculty and staff.

Calvin also plans to include Gulf Coast locations in its spring 2006 service trips, including one already scheduled for Port Gibson, Mississippi. College personnel also are working with staff at the John M. Perkins Foundation for Reconciliation and Development in Jackson, Mississippi to discuss a possible spring break collaboration around a housing project designed to house families affected by the hurricane.

Finally students who have been displaced from colleges and universities along the Gulf Coast will be offered the opportunity to enroll at Calvin this fall with a special, non-matriculating status. As needed, housing assistance will be offered to these students as available. And special efforts are being made by college personnel to contact peers at several Gulf Coast area colleges with ties to Calvin, in particular Dillard University and Xavier University.

Bouman says he thinks the college has come up with a good mix of short-term and long-term responses as well as a variety of responses true to the school's educational mission.

"We need to always remember," he says, "that our purpose at Calvin is to be a Christian, learning community. We're not an emergency aid organization. Yet anyone watching what is happening in the Gulf Coast right now weeps for victims of Hurricane Katrina. And so we want to respond to that awful situation. As a response team we considered how we could help people right away and down the road. We also considered how we could fit our responses into our educational purpose at Calvin, declaring with joy and trust, as followers of Jesus Christ, that our world belongs to God."