How King’s College Has Served the Community

By Janice Thompson, Ph.D. 

“. . . I have called you friends . .  .”  —John 15:15 

Rev. James Connerton, C.S.C., arrived in the City of Wilkes-Barre in 1945, commissioned to found a college for the sons of coal miners—responding to the vision of Bishop William J. Hafey of Scranton who had sought out the Congregation of Holy Cross to carry out this work. Father Connerton began the work of translating the hope of the Congregation of Holy Cross into the reality of a college community that would be an integral part of Wilkes-Barre and the Wyoming Valley. Father Connerton must have had tremendous hope for how this community would grow, but all that has actually grown in the seventy-five plus years is surely far more than he could have imagined. The Congregation’s founder, Blessed Basil Moreau, C.S.C., once envisioned the work of the community growing like a mighty tree, full of new limbs and branches while sharing the same life-giving sap. The energy that has fueled the growth of King’s College in Wilkes-Barre is at the core a kind of friendship, and we can celebrate the history of the King’s and Wilkes-Barre communities as the gift of friendship. 

Friendship is the will to live together, to care about each other’s flourishing, and to bring people together into a community, as Aristotle taught. Planting the seeds of King’s College and taking root in Wilkes-Barre, the Congregation of Holy Cross intertwined the communities of the College and the region in friendship, by offering the young men of the local community access to a college education and the expanded life opportunities that come with such an education. The first class was about 85% Pennsylvanians and 90% veterans. The College’s commitment to care for those most in need especially involved welcoming veterans as students at first. 

Returning from service in World War II, many veterans felt as though the world had left them behind, while at the same time some locals look with fear at veterans as “embryo gangsters”—so damaged by war that they were no longer fit for community life. King’s welcomed these men into the college community, discovering in the process what “ambitious, resourceful, hard-working students” they were. In no time, this young sapling of a college, growing in friendship, was branching out in new ways. 

The goal of an education is the good life. As founding President, Father Connerton famously described the good life as both “how to make a living” and “how to live.” Gaining a college education at King’s helped students to access better job opportunities, which helped their families and their communities. While education brought a growth in intellectual excellence and academic skills, it also developed their skills or virtues as good citizens and good human beings.  Throughout its history, King’s students faced the questions of day-to-day living of each era.  How would they respond to racist or sexist practices in the local community or in the College?  How would they confront new wars and new political debates? Both inside and outside of the classroom, a King’s College education addresses these questions. 

King’s also strives to build the good life through its involvement as an institution in the community. The economic health of Wilkes-Barre and the College are closely linked, and King’s has worked with the city to promote the flourishing of the region and its own growth. In 1952, leaders at King’s learned that—due to the falling coal economy—the Lehigh Valley Coal Company would sell their building on North River Street. With the help of local business owners, King’s was able to acquire this building (now the Administration Building), and just two years later the Marion Apartments (now Hafey-Marian Hall)—two “giant steps” for King’s future. In the early 1960s, after the Knox Mine Disaster ended most coal mining in the region, King’s worked with the Wilkes-Barre Planning Commission to focus on revitalizing for the College the northern edge of the city, especially between North River and Franklin Streets and between Union and North streets for the College, winning a grant from the federal government for the “King’s College Urban Renewal Project.” For a few years, King’s had rented floors to house students at the Hotel Sterling, but grants for urban renewal through the 1960s—plus support from alumni, the diocese, and the community—helped the College continue to grow, adding a high-rise residence hall, Holy Cross Hall; the gym; the Campus Center, a second lower-rise dorm, and the D. Leonard Corgan Library.   

In 1972, however, the remnants of Hurricane Agnes dumped 14 trillion gallons of water on Wilkes-Barre and the Wyoming Valley. On June 23, the levees gave way and flooded the region, causing fifty deaths in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and at least three billion dollars in damages to the Susquehanna River basin, the costliest national disaster up to that time. Every college building sustained damage, and so did many of the homes and family businesses of King’s students, faculty, and staff. As soon as the first floor of Holy Cross Hall had been cleaned up, it became the center for federal and state recovery efforts, with the hall providing lodging and meals for hundreds of displaced members of the college community and for clean-up volunteers. While King’s and the “Valley with A Heart” responded to the disaster with incredible community effort to address the emergency, the struggle was long and painful, as people and businesses left the city and the College. King’s continued to fight for both.  

King’s dedication to the Wyoming Valley was recognized in a 2008 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Struggling Communities Turn to Colleges,” which presented King’s College as a “community anchor” and as a model for other communities in the way King’s helped Wilkes-Barre by converting buildings abandoned by businesses into expansions of the College’s campus. King’s has continued to invest in restoring and renewing the community, energizing economic growth around Public Square by supporting a shared bookstore with Wilkes University, and then purchasing the Ramada Hotel and the former Times Leader newspaper building. To the north, King’s restored the historic buildings of the Spring Brook Water Supply Company and the Presbyterian Memorial Church into the Engineering Building and the new Chapel of Christ the King. The Wilkes-Barre community has repeatedly recognized the College for its commitment to local economic and civic development, most recently as the Gold Winner in the College category for the 2023 Times Leader Best of the Best Awards, an award it has won many times. 

The friendship King’s offers to the surrounding communities is also motivated by a deeper awareness that the good life is not possible without justice, and without service to those who are most in need. At every stage of its history, King’s has worked to serve the wider community, such as in early efforts to raise money for the “Community Chest” (now the United Way), to offer education access to the community, or to run blood drives at the College. Over time, King’s life of service to the community has grown into a major branch of the College’s life in the community. While early service efforts were common but piecemeal, many have become regular habits, like the blood drives. The establishment of the first Office of Volunteer Services, about twenty-five years ago, which grew into the Shoval Center for Community Engagement and Learning, has especially focused and developed the College’s service to the community. For such dedicated service, the College was named to the U.S. President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for National and Community Service. The award is the highest federal recognition a school can achieve for its commitment to community service and civic engagement. King’s is the only Wyoming Valley institution of higher learning to receive this honor every year it was awarded from 2006 to 2016. 

Serving the community and the common good is part of working towards the good life, as no one can be fully happy while others are struggling. The Shoval Center helps provide students with volunteer opportunities and service-learning courses where students put this commitment into action, providing everything from volunteers and tutoring to public service announcements, marketing and research assistance, and website design for dozens of local nonprofits. During breaks, the Shoval Center runs SERVE trips that bring students together to serve, live, and reflect together during a school break. King’s students have provided service in trips based in the Wyoming Valley; on national trips such as to André House in Phoenix, Arizona, My Brother’s Keeper in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Christian Appalachia Project in Paintsville, Kentucky; and even international trips to Holy Cross communities of service in Uganda, Bangladesh, and Mexico. King’s commitment to service is seen in yearly events like CitySERVE, where all new first-year students begin their King’s orientation with an introduction to community service in Wilkes-Barre, and in Hunger for Justice Week, which brings November’s national focus on hunger and homelessness to address the specific challenges faced in our local community. The Shoval Center has helped start and maintain food and clothing pantries for students in need and community gardens to provide fresh produce to local nonprofits. They help students find service placements all across Northeastern Pennsylvania: King’s students have volunteered at Ruth’s Place (a local emergency shelter for women experiencing homelessness), the St. Vincent De Paul Soup Kitchen, the Commission on Economic Opportunity, the McGlynn Learning Center, New Roots Recovery Support Center, the Catherine McCauley Center, Habitat for Humanity, and many local schools and senior living centers. The Shoval Center also offers opportunities for students with deep commitments to service to work together in groups like the Social Justice Leadership Project and Communities of Hope. 

The Shoval Center helps organize King’s responses to immediate community needs, such as organizing students to help in the clean up after local flooding from Tropical Storm Lee in September of 2011. When Ruth’s Place lost its home in 2008, King’s was instrumental in helping the shelter incorporate as a nonprofit and in finding a new home. King’s students continue to help Ruth’s Place residents prepare résumés and apply for jobs. King’s dedication to service has been recognized through the awarding of more than half a million dollars in grants for the College’s community service programs, such as winning a major Congressional grant in 2008 for service-learning and community-based research. In 2023, King’s is nearing the completion of its three-year, $300,000 grant from the AllOne Foundation to start community food pantries. King’s has provided refrigeration, shelving, and logistical support to nine different area agencies and schools, providing more than 317,000 pounds of food to people in need, by working with four regional food banks that provide all their food for free. The AllOne grant also helped King’s create the AboutFace Campaign to reduce stigma surrounding substance use disorder in college-age students. King’s is always ready to step in to help when the community is in need, such as the recent fire in B’nai B’rith Apartments, a senior living center, in February of 2024, where King’s student volunteers helped clean up the damage from the fire. 

The desire to live together, to care about each other’s flourishing, is not simply the friendship Aristotle described, philia, but also the friendship motivated by love, agape, which Christians understand as God’s love for humans, as seen in the life of Jesus. This is a love of service, a love that is willing to sacrifice, and to search out the most vulnerable and the most in need. This love motivated the Congregation’s response to Bishop Hafey’s call to come to Wilkes-Barre to start a college, rallied the Catholic community around the growth of King’s, and motivated the priests and brothers of Holy Cross throughout the College’s history to care for students, the institution, and the surrounding community, including regularly celebrating Masses and other sacraments all around the diocese, and leading workshops and retreats. This love continues to feed King’s institutional commitment to service and to the common good, and to offer all King’s students opportunities to find their vocation, including religious vocations and vocations for service. In the Gospel of John, Jesus offered the simple explanation that the nature of God is love—love is what God offers us and how God asks us to respond, to God and to each other. Deeply rooted in the life of Wilkes-Barre and the Wyoming Valley, King’s has grown into a strong tree with firm branches. The energy that fuels its life is always also a love that is committed to service and to making life in the Wyoming Valley better for all, especially those most in need.

Image at Top: The Agnes Flood of 1972 devastates campus and Downtown Wilkes-Barre.