Blessed Edmund Rice Solidarity Initiative

Download the 2011-12 BERSI Initial Application


Pioneered by Dr. James P. Keane '82, BERSI is a unique learning experience that brings together the structure of a rigorous classroom environment with the richness of personal academic encounters in such diverse environments as Peru, El Salvador, South Korea, New York, and Chicago. The students who attend our program during summer and school vacations convinced us that students learn best when they take on demanding projects in fascinating environments, receive personal attention from skilled educators, direct their own learning, and participate in a close-knit supportive community.

Above, CM students in the Dominican Republic in April 2011.

In the summer of 2003, 56 students participated in the two-week, co-ed program that brought students to such locales as the BU Library, Lovell's Island in Boston Harbor, Mark Twain's House, Harvard University, and the graves of E.E. Cummings and Eugene O'Neil. The BERSI kids met CM alumnus and best-selling author, William Martin, who read excerpts from his soon-to-be published work, Citizen Washington. They also had a class with Ronan Noone, winner of the Elliott Norton National Award for best new play and Boston Magazine's award for best Boston playwright. Students read Henry David Thoreau's journals and then went on an environmental hike of Mount Monadnock. They also wrote music with CM's own Mr. Craig Spaner, listened to a lecture on the preferential option, and spent an afternoon with the homeless at the Boston Shattuck Shelter.

The BERSI program was a success on several fronts. It introduced CM students and parents to a new, exciting, and very creative way of learning. It was extraordinarily well planned and well considered. It helped empower a core of our most enthusiastic and creative teachers, letting them experiment and try new pedagogies.

To keep alive the creativity and dynamism that has filtered into our classrooms and grade-level activities, the Brother Edmund Rice Solidarity Initiative (BERSI) continued its travel seminars with trips to Montreal, New York, and Chicago in the following summers, and several summer enrichment offerings including AP US History Prep, Algebra Plus and a course to help rising seniors with college placement and the college essay.

Building off of the summer seminars came immersion trips to Peru, El Salvador, and in 2009 the first trip to South Korea. In Peru, the trip involves close interaction with grammar school students at the Fe y Alegria school run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers. The trip also exposes students to the history, politics, culture, and theology of Peru. Similarly, in El Salvador, students visit non-governmental organizations effecting change and begin to do so themselves with week-long projects, reflections, encounters with the poor, and work.  The trip is coordinated through International Partners in Mission, a non-profit organization supported by the World Council of Churches, and includes service projects and meetings at the University of Central America. 

All BERSI voyages provide everyone involved with extraordinarily powerful, potentially transformative experiences that are both intellectually and spiritually challenging.

BERSI has come to serve CM as a teacher-workshop, enabling our gifted, creative teachers to stretch the boundaries of regular pedagogy and explore the possibilities of experiential learning outside the classroom. The program is also serving as a catalyst for experiential learning activities during the school year.