The Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) is an organization of lay volunteers who volunteer one year or more to community service with poor communities. JVC works in inner city neighborhoods and rural communities in about 36 different cities throughout the U.S. JVC works with the homeless, abused women and children, immigrants and refugees, the mentally ill, people with HIV/AIDS and other illnesses, the elderly, children, and on behalf of other marginalized groups. Jesuit Volunteers (JVs) in the international program that places volunteers in other countries.

The organization's official motto is "Dare to change".

In 1956, Jesuits from the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus and the Sisters of Saint Ann formed a partnership to open the Copper Valley School—a boarding school for Native Alaskan children—near Glennallen, Alaska. Bishop Francis Doyle Gleeson saw the need for a good boarding school closer to villagers, which became a plan to build the Copper Valley School. St. Ann Sister George Edmond went to the East Coast and persuaded five students to teach at Copper Valley. Bishop Gleeson formed a team of lay volunteers, mostly engineering students from Gonzaga University. These lay volunteers, brought into Alaska by Gleeson and Edmond, were the first recruits of what became the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. The religious, the students and volunteers faced much adversity in constructing the school, including working in temperatures of seventy-below-zero during the Alaska winter. One student from a local village described the experience of meeting the new volunteers as bringing him "into a whole new world." The volunteers were considered lay missionaries. Copper Valley School closed in 1971.

The Jesuit Volunteer Corps was founded and named by Jack Morris, S.J. Morris had participated in the initial Copper Valley School project as a seminarian. While Morris was working at Monroe Catholic High School in Fairbanks, Alaska, he learned about the progress of the Copper Valley School and saw the potential of the volunteers. Morris recruited volunteers at Catholic colleges all over the United States, telling students that JVC was twice as old as the Peace Corps and ten times more rewarding. His recruitment brochure called for those "young and old - with adult joy and adult stability. Men and women who dig in, work hard, laugh loud and often. Flexible enough to adjust to diverse companions, tasks and environments". During this time, JVs lived on a budget of ten dollars per month.

In the 1960s, Jesuit Volunteers branched out of Alaska and into the Pacific Northwest, serving Native Americans as well as marginalized populations in the inner cities, with the support of the Society of Jesus. JVs volunteered at St. Mary's Indian School on the Colville Indian Reservation in Northern Washington state. In Alaska, by 1968, JVs outnumbered Jesuits. JVs served in remote areas such as Nulato, Alaska. The four values that became the movement's guiding principles were not formalized, but JVs lived by them.

During this time, the JVC movement influenced other volunteer groups, including the Peace Corps. Over two hundred volunteer programs have been modeled after JVC.

The initial Northwest JVC inspired other JVC chapters across the country. JVC chapters were established in the Midwest in 1974; on the East Coast in 1975; in the Southwest in 1977; in the American South in 1980. JVC also took root in other countries: England, Ireland, France, Italy, Bulgaria and the Philippines.

Jesuit International Volunteers (JIV) was formed in 1984. JIV had programs in Belize, Tanzania, Micronesia, Peru and Nepal.