When John Ahlbach became Directorof Christian Community Service at San Francisco’s Archbishop Riordan High School in 2001, he wanted to establish an immersion program that would bring teachers and students together, working side-by-side in a variety of service programs. After three years of seeking financial support, Ahlbach’s department received a grant from the Marianist (Society of Mary) Sharing Fund, and also from the school’s recycling fund. Although the financial support was small, it was enough to inspire the veteran teacher of 28 years to make his vision a reality, with the students paying a majority of their expenses.

For the past two summers Ahlbach has taken Riordan students to Birmingham, Alabama where he and “the kids” rolled up their sleeves and worked for the needy. “Birmingham had everything I wanted for us,” he said. “It had a job site, direct work with the needy in an unfamiliar part of the country, and a moving and dramatic historical context the kids could study.”

Outreach, Inc., a non-profit organization that builds affordable housing and repairs old homes for the needy, hosted the volunteers. At a construction site, the San Francisco crew was put to work quickly. “We did a lot of the grunt work,” said Ahlbach. “We landscaped, moved bricks, moved dirt, and hauled garbage to the debris box. On a few occasions the kids walked down a couple of blocks from the site and ate their lunch at “the oldest surviving baseball stadium in America,” Birmingham’s Rickwood Field, where Satchel Paige and Willie Mays played professional baseball for the Birmingham Black Barons.

Once the construction site work was finished the group moved on to working directly with the needy at a soup kitchen.

The “Old Firehouse” in downtown Birmingham, a homeless shelter that also provides warm meals and drug treatment programs, proved to be an experience that moved everyone, including Ahlbach. Doug, the head cook at the “Old Firehouse,” made such an impression on Ahlbach that today he keeps a photograph of him on his desk at Riordan. “When things seem rough during my day at school, I look at his picture to keep my spirits up, where they should be,” he said.

Doug, a Vietnam Veteran and former semi-pro football player founded the first Hospice prison program in the South – after witnessing first-hand, the needs of dying inmates being ignored. In his eighth year of a 25-to-life sentence in Alabama’s state penitentiary, he no longer could quietly accept that the needs of the dying inmates were being ignored, and how quickly the inmates were forgotten in death.

During the next five years, Doug managed to keep the inequities suffered by the dying inmates in the Alabama newspapers. The attention brought success. He was able to see that the needs of more than 350 inmates were taken care of in their final days at the prisons. He also had a “Tree of Life” memorial created listing the names of the prisoners who died in Alabama prisons.

Another man at the “Old Firehouse” caught Ahlbach’s attention. Although his encounter with him was brief, he could not forget “Reginald.” He was a young, homeless man reading a book of devotions. Ahlbach asked him about the church he attends. Reginald told him that he did not worship at any particular church - but he always gave 10 percent of what he was able to earn that week to whatever church he happened to be worshipping in on any Sunday. During the evening, the group helped Doug prepare dinner and then served it.
They also visited with the guests, and played cards and chess with them until “ lights out.”

At 4 a.m., the kids and teacher jumped out of their cots to make breakfast and serve it to the shelter’s guests. Henry Lee, one of the Riordan students who accompanied Ahlbach to Alabama, said in his 2006 valedictorian speech “The rainy evening we hosted a full house at the Old Fire House in Birmingham, Alabama was one of the most meaningful experiences I had in my four years at Riordan.”

Also during the summer trips, Ahlbach was able to immerse the students in the history of the South, especially the Civil Rights Movement. He took the students to Atlanta, a three-hour drive, to visit the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Museum, the Center for Nonviolence, and the Ebenezer Baptist Church where King’s father, and he preached. Ahlbach said a highlight of the trip was meeting 80-year-old “Mr. Henry Alexander,” whose children were the first to integrate the schools of Birmingham, Alabama in 1964. Every Sunday, “Mr. Alexander” gives an oral history at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute while standing next to the exhibit created in his honor. Ahlbach and the Riordan students visited the 16th Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham where Alexander explained that four young American girls were killed when a bomb went off in the basement, Sept. 15, 1964. He called it a racist act opposing integration.

The Riordan visitors attended Sunday Mass at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Bessemer, 20 miles from Birmingham. Franciscans established the community soon after World War II to minister to African Americans. This was at a time that life discrimination was a daily fact of life in the decades preceding the Civil Rights Movement. Ahlbach explained the importance for all of them to witness the best and the worst about the past in the South. “We left knowing we did our best to create something better,” he said.