Lauren Repke ’15: As part of its annual admission conference, The Episcopal Academy admissions office volunteered at Philabundance this fall for a community service project. Admissions professionals from independent schools all over the country meet once a year for a large conference held by the Secondary School Admission Test Board.
According to Rachel Tilney, head of admissions, “there were over 600 admission professionals from schools across the country, Canada and other countries. This conference is a great opportunity for us to connect with our colleagues at other schools to share ideas.” As a tradition, the day before the conference, admissions officers participate in a service project in the location of the conference. “Each year we try and focus on different things. Last year we worked with education, the year before we worked on a pueblo, and this year we worked with a hunger relief organization,” notes Tilney. This service tradition started in 2008 when the conference was held in New Orleans. The conference partnered with Hands On, New Orleans to help with recovery efforts following the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
As this year’s conference was held in Philadelphia, admissions officers volunteered at Philabundance, a food distribution organization which EA has been volunteering at for years. “My responsibility is to gather a volunteer group to work before the conference,” said Tilney, “and Philabundance is so organized and easy to work with which is why we chose them and why so many schools in our area volunteer with them.” According to Susan Swanson, Director of Community Outreach, Philabundance is “a huge organized program that distributes packages of food to pantries. They get a lot of food from the manufacturers that are extra or almost expired and repackage them to ship to various food pantries around the city.”
On Wednesday September 18th the admissions officers headed to Philabundance with a team of 35 admissions officers where they spent the morning packaging food boxes. Zachary Richards, Assistant Director of Admissions, said “It was nice that it was a local affair this year so we were all able to participate in the community service project.” Throughout the project, admissions officers neatly stocked and weighed boxes of food that were packaged and shipped off to pantries. In the three hour time frame the admissions officers alone managed to package roughly 27,000 boxes of food.
The constant success of these service projects each year is due to the work of Tilney and the admissions officers at EA. When asked about plans for the conference in years to come, Tilney commented, “I’ve already been talking about plans for Orlando next year and Las Vegas the following year.” Based on the success of this year’s service project, Episcopal admissions will continue to lead the admissions volunteers of independent schools each year before the conference to lend a helping hand to people in need.