Alternative Breaks have been a signature student experience at Loyola Marymount University for a long time: many students return from these domestic and global immersion experiences feeling a profound sense of transformative growth.
And if you ask LMU alumni, they would likely still be able to tell you how those experiences were a transformational part of their collegiate journey. So, about a year ago Patrick Furlong, director of the Pam Rector Center for Service and Action (CSA) got to thinking: how could LMU take such a profoundly transformational experience and find a way to bring together alumni, who would have a shared experience of attending LMU, to experience an Alternative Break immersion again, together as alumni. The idea became Furlong’s Ignatian Colleagues Project, where participants engage in a rich intellectual foundation and through experiential learning opportunities in order to articulate, adapt, and advance the Jesuit and Catholic mission of their institutions.
To create this experience Furlong turned to Kat Brown, director of Mission and Identity programs in LMU’s Mission and Ministry division, an alumna who in her current role takes faculty and staff members at LMU on global immersion experiences that are community learning and a retreat experience to grow deeper in their understanding of the university’s mission. Those cultivated early ideas would lead to putting out information in LMU’s alumni newsletter and to reach out to several alumni from all generations to garner if there was interest in such an immersion. There was and the experience filled to capacity within two weeks of being offered. Furlong and Brown would meet with each alumni participant via Zoom calls over the next several weeks and both walked away from those calls hearing from everyone on how they had longed for an experience like this and how they had been missing their LMU community, and the hope that this experience would reconnect them to it. Some of the participants received scholarships from Alpha Sigma Nu, the Jesuit Honor Society, if they were a member, to offset the cost of their participation.
In October 2025, thirteen alumni were led by Furlong and Brown in an Alternative Breaks immersion and retreat experience with the Center for Global Education and Experience to a tiny town in Italy where they would find that their connections to LMU, even having studied at LMU in different times periods, their collective hunger for a transformational experience would connect them. The participants’ graduation years extended from the 1980s to the 2020s, and all were at a point in their life experiences where they were at the crossroads of a transition period, whether that be through things with their work or familial lives.
“During this experience, it was amazing to see how people connected across generations,” said Furlong. “There’s like a special kinship here, they probably had totally different LMU experiences, and yet that core mission is something central that they could both bond to, connect to, and talk about as a shared experience as they move forward in their lives.”
The journey would immerse participants in topics like immigration, movement of people around the world, and how they could find hope in a community that actually was facing similar circumstsances through the theme of “Reconciliation with Earth, Other, and Self.”
For Micaela Plummer ’18, ’21, an elementary education and urban education major, global immersions enriched her LMU student experience all the way around from going on Alternative Breaks with CSA to a study abroad program formerly known as Casa de la Mateada in Córdoba, Argentina. Post-graduation, Plummer served as one of LMU’s resident ministers, living in community with undergraduate students and now she currently serves as the director of Campus Ministry at Marymount High School. For her, this experience was something she’s asking of her own students: take a service or alternative break immersion to reconnect with yourself, your identity, and your faith. Plummer learned of the experience through the LMU Alumni newsletter and reached out to Furlong to learn more about what this alumni AB experience could look like. “Traveling with LMU alumni across generations reminded me of the best of this community. Our experiences at LMU had been different over the years, but the thread that remained constant and connected us all was a shared longing for meaning and a belief that how we engage with the world matters,” said Plummer.
One of the most memorable experiences for Plummer was a visit to a local cheese shop where the group met Francisco, the cheesemonger, who had majored in chemistry during his college years. The partnering organization often walks into these shops to connect with the artisans behind the craft, and Francisco stood out. “He spoke about his cheese with extraordinary passion and care, revealing a deep kinship with the cows and the entire process. The sincerity of his words was moving, there was nothing inauthentic about him. He was simply sharing who he was and what he loved.”
Far from home and everyday routines, each person was really able to immerse themselves in the experiences of the week, being in a beautiful place and connecting with good people all under the commonality of all having had the LMU experience and their own life experiences beyond collegiate life. For Robbie Lee ’04, a business finance major, who serves as the president of the LMU Alumni Association and is the founder and CEO of Synergies Redefined, the most impactful part of the experience was the cross-generational relationships that were built.” Lee said, “We had graduates from before my time and after, all coming together for this shared experience. We cooked meals, shopped for groceries, and gathered for meaningful conversations to start and end each day. Regardless of their background, everyone came with a self-driven commitment to make the most of each experience and every dialogue. That mindset came from the richness of life experiences they brought with them. You could tell people were genuinely interested in understanding one another and the communities we visited.”
Lee described one experience of meeting a farmer named Roberto who was responsible for cultivating olive trees on the property the group was staying at. He was really passionate about plans and talked about the energy plants contribute to our environment. “Roberto spoke about how we must steward every space we enter,” said Lee. “It’s those things that inspire you to look at the world differently. When I came back home I started looking at the impact I can have on the communities I work with and how I can walk in a way that aligns with LMU values and mission to really frame the way I do my work in my own community.”
Lee described the overall experience as illuminating. “Being in such a small community and interacting with folks there was a mutual benefit from the interactions the dialogues, we walked into these things expecting to be the beneficiaries of these interactions, I’m the weird guy who asks them about their story, I found myself to be in that they were interested in hearing our story and our perspective just as much as we were there was this very mutual curiosity that we entered into and there was this all of us having benefited from the interaction from a broadening of perspective.”
During one of the last portions of the trip, the group focused on more of a retreat-like experience, when they had done a lot of thinking about the Earth and others. “This whole section was informed by our prior conversations, hearing from participants on the transitions in their own lives and what it would be like to come out on the other side of that,” said Brown. “They really took that time to share with one another in a very vulnerable and very moving way to be in that space together. It really felt like a culmination of the entire week, but this was the moment that suddenly it felt like the whole group gelled together as one, and I found that in one another as a group there was so much of a sense of care, community, and relationship and honoring one another’s stories, which can be so rare to find, not everybody find that’s community where they feel safe and valued for who they are.”
In reflecting on the experience, Plummer shared a recent article authored by retired LMU professor Jennifer Abe, Ph.D., on the murmuration of birds and hope. Abe shared, “How will we choose to live as participants in this cosmic swirl of activity, wind and wing, hope and dream, as we live out the particulars of our shared lives on this earth? To participate in this way is to link hope with action, action which connects us with others in unseen synchrony as the ‘slow work of God’ continues within us, through us, and in our world. This is the way we can live into, and towards, a future with hope.”
Plummer left the experience and came back to her role at Marymount High School feeling renewed, transformed, and hopeful. “In a time that often feels heavy, knowing there are people out there who care this deeply gives me so much hope,” said Plummer. “This group of people who have all had the LMU student experience, saw the value of stepping out of the routine and comfort of their lives for a whole week to engage in a new way and ask questions of how they live their lives and how to engage with their own communities. Like Dr. Abe, I feel like we are all moving together in small ways, and that gives me hope.”
