College Students Trade Fun in the Sun for Opp. to Spend Their Summer Helping Inner City Families

NEW YORK, May 1, 2008—This summer, more than 100 college students will be skipping the beach and putting part-time jobs on hold to help and inspire America's inner-city families.

The students will join urban ministry Here's Life Inner City for a unique outreach effort called Summer in the City.

"We send eager college students into the inner city for close-range, heart-to-heart, hands-on ministry," said Ted Gandy, national director of Here's Life Inner City. "These dedicated students positively impact the lives of inner-city kids and families, not just for the summer, but for a lifetime."

Summer in the City volunteers help produce outreach events with urban churches, tutor children and teenagers, serve in food pantries, and minister in jails and rehab centers.

It's challenging work with many rewards-but pay is not one of them. The students not only forfeit their summer vacation, they also pay for their travel expenses, lodging, meals and supplies.

"These young people joyfully grind out long hours of hard work because they know they're really making a difference in people's lives," said Gandy.

To help defray some of the student's expenses, or to find out more information about Summer in the City, visit www.HLIC.org.

"Everyone I met during the summer outreach thanked me, saying I could never know the impact made and the lives touched," said University of Virginia student Emily Woodley, who participated last year in Summer in the City in Seattle. "But they will never know the impression they left on my heart."

Here's Life Inner City, the urban ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ, International, is dedicated to equipping churches to provide help and hope to the poverty-stricken in their communities. Since 1983, Here's Life Inner City and more than a thousand partner churches and organizations have been responding to the growing epidemic of poverty and despair in the inner city. The wide-ranging efforts have provided the poor with food and other basic necessities, life skills, career development and youth development programs.

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