Community Basics

What is life like at St. Therese Institute of Faith and Mission?

This page goes into some of the particulars of what you’d experience in St. Therese community life. For a breakdown of what a typical day looks like, check out A Day in the Life. The structure of our days at St. Therese helps support the life of the community and the formation of each person.

Dorm Life

You will live on campus together with other young adults. We have a men’s floor and a women’s floor where you will share a dorm room. In addition to a bed, desk, and closet space in the dorm, you also have a couple “cubby” and mailbox spaces on the main floor; Cubbies are where frequently-used belongings and school books can be kept. You will also be enrolled in our full meal plan, which provides three meals per day, including on weekends. We have communal fridges/freezers where personal snacks can be stored.

Sports and Recreation

We love to have fun and recreate in a variety of ways! You’ll get to play floor hockey, basketball, volleyball, dodgeball, and more in our large gymnasium. We also have a work-out room and a large field for all things frisbee and snow play. The art room is a creative space at your disposal. Our library is both a great resource and a cozy place to study! A large board game collection and a piano are housed in our comfy Coffee Room. You are welcome and encouraged to bring your personal musical instruments. Finally, all manner of baking, pickling, coffee-roasting, and kombucha-culturing are welcome in our community kitchen space.

Intentional Community

Community is such an important part of our program at St. Therese. We grow it and care for it with great intentionality. You might be surprised by some ways we do that! For example, our dorms are tech-free zones and personal phone time is limited to 30 minutes per day. Though the outside culture is saturated with media and prone to distraction, our community chooses to be radically present to where they are and who they are with, wholly available to God and to neighbor.

Together, we commit to being present to this community for the duration of the Gap Year program. St. Therese becomes your home for nine months, with recesses for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break, and some weekends. Finally, you are asked not to form romantic relationships with each other for the duration of the program. Instead, you are encouraged to relate to one another as brothers and sisters. Maybe you need to see it to believe it, but this creates an incredibly joyous and peaceful freedom in the community! You can be yourself, not worrying about trying to impress someone or navigating the drama of “who likes who”; God gets be the center of your focus while you’re here. It is a great part of being a at St. Therese.

Where in the world are we?

Our beloved building is a historic 65,000 sqft former Ursuline convent and school. It houses our chapel, classrooms, dorms, and everything in between. The center part of the facility dates back to 1918! Our 65-acre grounds are decked with wooded paths and orchards, which make for lovely walks. The adjacent grounds of St. Bruno Parish feature a beautiful grotto to Mary, Mother of Mercy, and and outdoor Stations of the Cross.

We’re situated in “the cherry town of the prairies”, Bruno, SK. Bruno has a population of around 600. It has grocery, gas, and hardware stores, a post office, a library, a restaurant, an artificial-ice skating rink, a pharmacy, various trades, and a vibrant Catholic parish. We are less than one hour from Saskatoon and twenty minutes from Humboldt. It’s little, much like St. Thérèse’s village of Lisieux or Jesus’ backwater town of Nazareth. Life is slow and steady here, and the sky is wide and beautiful.