See if you can volunteer through your local Catholic Charities at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen. Meeting people who are homeless is often the best way to dispel stereotypes and preconceived notions about them.
If you want to go deeper, you can even make the radical move of volunteering for a summer with a program like Christ in the City, a Denver-based ministry in which young adults work directly with homeless people living on the streets, getting to know them on a personal level and befriending them.
On the other hand, if you are naturally drawn toward the causes of racial inequality and homelessness, but have never attended a pro-life rally, look for ways to broaden your scope of vision.
Volunteer at your local pro-life center or a home for pregnant women. Hear the stories of women who are pregnant and scared. Listen to the stories of pain and regret from women who chose abortion because they felt trapped or coerced and thought they had no alternative. See the joy in a woman's face when she looks at her infant child – the child she had considered aborting until she changed her mind when she felt the support of a loving community.
Sign up to attend next year's March for Life in Washington DC on Jan. 18. Or sign up to attend your local walk for life.
If you're 18 or older, you can sign up to spend your summer with Crossroads, a pro-life organization that walks across the country – literally – every summer to promote the pro-life message.
Learning more about the causes outside the scope of our vision is a good way to awaken our sense of compassion and broaden our horizons, seeing the suffering and injustice that we may not have realized even existed.
We should allow ourselves to be humbled as we realize that there is so much suffering in this world – and even in our own backyards – that we had never even acknowledged. We should let ourselves be challenged to pray for people who need help, and in whatever way we feel called, to advocate on their behalf.
It's a way to "see the entirety of your life as a mission," as Pope Francis calls us to do in Gaudete et exsultate. Because, in the words of Benedict XVI, cited by Pope Francis in his new document, "holiness is nothing other than charity lived to the full."