Katie O’Reilly ’14: As EA is a community with so much at its fingertips, it is not uncommon for those visiting Episcopal to wonder how the school is using its wealth for the benefit of the global community. During the Holocaust Remembrance Chapel in early April, for example, Ms. Sandra Roberts challenged EA asking why if her small community made such a difference, why can’t we?
In the small southeastern Tennessee town of Whitwell, Roberts and a group of middle school students raised awareness by collecting paperclips to remember the Holocaust victims in Nazi Germany. Sandra Roberts began the overwhelming task of teaching about Holocaust with a small representation of a memorial for the victims that snowballed into a massive project for the entire community. The students decided to collect six million paper clips to represent the estimated six million Jews killed between 1939 and 1945 under the authority of the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler. The project started out small but eventually grew until the group had received over 30 million paper clips from people all over the world. Ultimately, the project sparked a film documentary called Paper Clips that was released in 2004.
Roberts noted that her community is quite poor; about half of the students at the Middle School qualify for the free lunch program, which is a benefit for lower income American school children.
So when Roberts spoke in Chapel she referenced the point that if a poor rural Tennessee community could generate so much attention for their raising awareness of the victims of the Holocaust, what was stopping a thriving suburban area outside the city of Philadelphia?
Director of Community Outreach, Susan Swanson noted that the differences in our schools play a role in why were are doing different things for the community. She stated, “I think that there are a couple of things that are at play. One is that the town that she lives, in as she said, is pretty poor and ours is not so kids have a lot more opportunities to be involved in a lot of things. So they are involved in athletics, they are involved in the play, and Junto, whereas I think at her school they probably do not have all of those other things.” Therfore, students do not spend all of their time outside of the classroom strictly focused on community outreach as they did as Roberts suggested in Whitwell, Tennessee.
However Swanson also noted, “That said, I think I would feel the same way that she does coming to this school and seeing what we have and wondering why we aren’t changing the world. But I think that we do a lot of good in a lot of small ways.” For instance, the community service program helps out in many ways in different areas, such as hunger with the Caring Cupboard and the Penny Wars in which the proceeds will go towards some of our community partners. We also have a tutoring program four days a week where students travel to Roxborough after school to work with elementary school students at the Cook-Wissahickon School. Through the Sunday Suppers at UCHC, the EA community service program fosters good connections. Swanson added, “I mean we do a lot, and it is not always the same people who participate. Yes, we would love to have a lot more participation from students.”
Our community has never entirely focused on one issue as the school in Tennessee focused primarily on raising awareness of the Holocaust. As Swanson mentioned, “I do not think that our community has gathered around one sort of issue like they did and that came out of a central piece where our community programs are not really based in the curriculum, we are more focused outside of the classroom.” On top of having a diverse variety of service options, Assistant Director of Community Outreach Rebecca Brinks noted, “But there are also continued relationships with the organizations that we work with that carry over for years. UCHC has been going on for about thirty years.” Despite the fact that EA does not have one signature project Brinks highlighted another point: “In many cases with outreach, the continuity is just as important because sometimes you can raise a lot of money for an organization and then you are done and you go away. But where with tutoring we go four times a week all year long or UCHC once a week all year long and we will go again next year.” Brinks added, “That community of support adds up overtime it is just not as glamorous.”
If we did focus on serving the community in one aspect we would fail to build well-rounded students who are aware of the various types of ways to serve our community. For example, Swanson stated, “My personal thing would be hunger. I would like to have everything we did focused on fighting hunger but that is serving me not our students and that’s who we are really here for to help get involved. And your interest may not be in hunger. So we try to provide opportunities for all kinds of people to be interested in.” Due to the educational basis of our community outreach program we need to generate a variety Brinks added, “Because we are a school, part of our job is to let students know about different ways to serve. So part of that is the educational part of our program.” By choosing just one thing to focus students might not have the opportunity to work with children in Philadelphia, protect the environment, or fight hunger.
Although Roberts mentioned points about the wealth of our school and how one day she would like to read about the great things that we do for the world, Swanson mentioned “It can come back to bite us sometimes because people say what are you doing, why aren’t you doing more? But they don’t really know what we are doing because we are not promoting it a lot.”
However, the Community Service Board has recently tried to raise participation through several daily bulletin and chapel announcements. Brinks concluded “Service is not about self-promotion, it is not to say that being on the cover of a newspaper or magazine is a bad thing. It just may not be as glitzy as a big win on the sports field or something like that. It is about serving.”