Tag: volunteering

Winter 2013: Greater Good

This article originally appeared in the winter 2013 Harker Quarterly.

Fundraiser Lets Dancers Shine

Grade 6 students Aarzu Gupta and Radhika Jain took first place for one of their dances in the Bollywood category at a fundraising competition held at Chabot College in Hayward. The competition was sponsored by the Charitable Care Foundation (CCF).

Founded in October 1991, the CCF aims to help needy people become healthy, productive and self-reliant. Their efforts and resources are focused on local and international needs, particularly in the Bay Area and India.

The girls regularly attend a Bollywood dance class together in San Jose.

Canned Food Drive Helps Ease Hunger

The middle school’s annual canned food drive took place in mid- November. The drive was hosted by Harker’s advisories in conjunction with the Second Harvest Food Bank. Many canned and non-perishable food items were collected in containers, which were located in classrooms throughout the campus.

Last year, almost 50 million Americans lived in homes without enough food to eat. Harker is proud to have collected 2,632 pounds of food in this year’s drive.

DECA Chapter and Red Cross Club Sponsor Event

In early November, Harker’s DECA chapter and Red Cross Club hosted a lunchtime community service event in front of Nichols Hall. Students placed granola bars, batteries, Band-Aids, hand sanitizers and toothbrushes into kits that may be sent to disaster victims overseas. They also made cards for Veterans Day.

The event was run in accordance with the community-oriented pillar of the national DECA organization. Creating disaster kits for those who can’t afford them illustrated “the type of community involvement crucial to building a foundation for community-oriented entrepreneurs,” according to California DECA’s press release.

Hot Chocolate Sale to Aid Typhoon Haiyan Victims

The week after Thanksgiving break, the lower school’s student council sponsored a hot chocolate sale to raise money for relief efforts in the Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan.

The funds raised by the hot chocolate sale were then combined with funds collected by the middle school for donation to Habitat for Humanity, which will help typhoon victims rebuild their homes. Faculty and staff also pitched in by donating money to offset the cost of supplies. The hot chocolate was sold for $1 a cup.

Colorful Painted Pumpkins Delivered to Neighbors

In a show of neighborly good will, this past fall grade 2 students painted and hand delivered pumpkins to residents living near the lower school campus.

The annual outreach and community service project took place in late October, just in time for Halloween.

After decorating the pumpkins and allowing them to dry, the students walked around the neighborhood leaving them on porches, along with cards.

“This was their annual service project to say ‘thank you’ to the local residents for being such good neighbors,” reported art teacher Gerry-louise Robinson, who facilitated the painting portion of the activity. Students painted in her room during their health education classes (one class at a time) with members of the BEST staff on hand to assist in the effort.

For student Kabir Ramzan, the biggest challenge was to “make the pumpkins really colorful.” Working in small groups, he and his classmates succeeded by painting in various hues of blue, green, yellow and red. They also gave each pumpkin its own special smile.

“It was action-packed and nonstop. … Utilizing the art room helped to make the event more meaningful and fun!” said Robinson, adding that the students really embraced drawing faces on the pumpkins; the facial expressions and details made each one a unique gift.

“It was marvelous how the children carefully chose colors and applied them,” she added. “The pumpkins all lined up ready to be delivered looked very charming indeed.”

“This is a really good project. I think it’s something the neighbors will like!” enthused student Aeliya Grover.

Club Plans Coastal Cleanup

In the fall, grades 4 and 5 held their first Spirit/Service Club meeting of the year, playing fun activities in advance of the Harker Harvest Festival.

“Our first club meeting was great. We had over a dozen fourth and fifth graders sign up. Fun was had by all!” reported Mel Robinson, a grade 5 P.E. teacher who helps coordinate the club.

In addition to playing spirited games, the Spirit/Service Club implements important outreach activities. For example, the club aids California coastal cleanup efforts and has a Green Committee charged with decreasing food waste in the lunchroom.

Students Donate to Emergency Shelter

Prior to her retirement, former middle school history teacher Pat White passed along her advisory project, which involves collecting toiletries for women and children at a local emergency shelter. Middle school math instructor Leah Moll took over the project, which benefits the Georgia Travis Center in San Jose.

“This year my seventh grade advisory, along with Kathy Pazirandeh’s advisory, have made and donated 85 personal kits to the center,” reported Moll.

The shelter is sponsored by the Inn-Vision Shelter Network, one of the leading shelter/housing and supportive service providers in Northern California. It aids more than 20,000 homeless men, women and children each year.

Middle School Holiday Drive Helps Fulfill Wish Lists

In an effort to serve people in need during the holiday season, Harker’s middle school community took on a project to help fulfill the “wish lists” of people living in low-income neighborhoods. After obtaining the names and wishes of individuals from an organization called Family Giving Tree, middle school families, faculty and staff set to work on fulfilling as many wishes as possible. Nearly 500 holiday wishes were granted to children, the elderly and physically disabled individuals in need, with gifts averaging about $20-$30.

Gift of Song, Carriage Rides and Wreath to Local Communities When the Saratoga Chamber of Commerce put out a call for wreaths to help decorate Blaney Plaza for the holiday season, the Awasthi family (Shivani, grade 9; Mohan, grade 6; and parents Anupam and Aarti) generously offered to create and donate one on behalf of Harker. The beautiful wreath, illuminated by LED lights, was clearly a labor of love.

And in a show of support for the Los Gatos community, Harker also helped sponsor carriage rides in the downtown area. For more than 30 years, the stately horse-drawn carriages, which meander through downtown, have attracted thousands of residents and visitors during the holiday season.

The upper school’s show choir, Downbeat, added to the cheer by caroling one night in downtown Los Gatos.

Upper School Holiday Volunteering at Harvest Food Bank

Kerry Enzensperger, the upper school’s director of community service and activities, reported that her advisory volunteered at the Second Harvest Food Bank the first night of Thanksgiving break. “We did a food sort at the Cypress Center in San Jose. Along with other volunteers we sorted carrots into boxes that weighed 25 pounds. By the end of our shift we had sorted 770 boxes of carrots equaling nine tons! We had a great time working together,” she said.

July 29, 2014Tags: giving back, greater good, Lower School, middle school, schoolwide, upper school, volunteering

Students for Charitable Causes Spread Service Across Campuses

This article originally appeared in the winter 2013 Harker Quarterly.

In 2008, grade 5 students Glenn Reddy, Jeremy Binkley and Nicholas Sancen were in search of a way to serve their community. “We didn’t want to just do a bake sale, because everyone does a bake sale,” said Reddy, who is now a junior. Instead, the lower school students collected various household items donated by the Harker community to sell at a garage sale.

The resulting club, PEACE2PEACE, held its first garage sale that year, raising $1,500 for AIDS Orphan Education Trust (AOET), which provides child welfare, medical care and other services to African children orphaned by the HIV/ AIDS crisis. It was a big enough feat to catch the attention of Google, which donated 100 laptops to AOET.

Since then, the club, now known as Students for Charitable Causes (SFCC), has held garage sales every year, benefiting a different cause each time. Members have continued to work together even as they moved from middle school to upper school, which is rare among student clubs.

“Normally what happens is when you go to the school, whatever campus you’re at, the program is already established and you’re a part of that program, and then when you go to the next campus, there’s the equivalent but for older kids,” said Reddy. “For us, the program didn’t exist. So we started the program in fifth grade and went to sixth grade and said, ‘We’re on a different campus now, why should we stop? We still want to help people; we still have the same goals.’”

Because its membership has been relatively consistent over the years, Reddy noted, the club has been able to operate more independently each subsequent year, “because we knew more about it than our club advisors did.”

“It really helped that by now everyone knows what the process is. We’re able to set a date, set a location, get everything working very early on,” said club vice president Sophia Shatas, grade 11, who joined as a middle school student.

The consistency also has enabled the club to learn from its past missteps, such as the 2010 garage sale, which raised about $800, far below expectations. “We didn’t think it through that much,” Reddy acknowledged.

Each sale since then, however, has raised more than the previous year’s sale. Earlier this year, Reddy and Shatas delivered a check for $3,200 – the highest amount yet raised – to Alejandra Villalobos, director of development for Embrace Global, which produces low-cost warmers for infants in developing countries.

“I think the club definitely matured with the leaders, so we’re a lot more organized now than in middle school,” said Shatas.

Reddy said that adding more organizational structure and delegation of responsibilities has been a big reason for the club’s success in recent years. “Having people directly responsible for these different components and actually breaking it down and having more or less an organization chart that says who’s responsible for what and who really gets the veto here or there, it helps a lot,” he said.

The club also shifted its focus to benefiting organizations based in the Bay Area, which allowed members to have more direct interaction and gain a better idea of how the money they raised was being used.

When the members of PEACE2PEACE entered the upper school, they changed the organization’s name to Students for Charitable Causes, which more closely matches the efforts they have taken on in addition to the annual garage sale. Since the 2011-12 school year, for example, the club has managed the annual upper school food drive, which delivers goods to the Second Harvest Food Bank. Members also participate in community service days, volunteering at places such as senior living homes and Resource Area for Teaching (RAFT), a nonprofit organization dedicated to hands-on learning.

In addition to giving the students more service opportunities, these outings also help complete the community service hours required by SFCC’s grade 9 members, who were recruited this year as its leaders approach graduation. “I feel that we didn’t leave enough of a legacy behind, setting the groundwork for the club to continue after we leave campus, which is something that we’re working really hard to do now,” Reddy said. To bolster the number of younger students in the organization, SFCC made sure to have a much larger presence at this year’s club fair and is looking to increase its presence on Harker’s other campuses. Already the club has engaged the middle school’s service club to assist with the drive to collect goods for the garage sale. “My dream, especially by senior year, would be to actually collect on the lower school campus as well and then work through the campuses’ respective service clubs,” Reddy said.

The club’s younger members are already starting to have a significant impact. When the club met to decide the beneficiary of the spring garage sale, freshman Arjun Subramaniam’s suggestion of Free the Children, which works to improve the lives of children in developing countries through a variety of means, was chosen. “I think that Free the Children is a wonderful organization working to combat child labor and abuse around the world, and I hope to continue supporting it and getting involved through my high school years,” Subramaniam said. Upon seeing SFCC’s display at the club fair, Subramaniam was “immediately captivated. It’s a great initiative and I definitely want to get involved and make a difference through social service.”

July 22, 2014Tags: Lower School, middle school, schoolwide, upper school, volunteering

Sew For Love Gets a Helping Hand

This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.

Five fifth grade girls shared the joy of volunteering during a fun community service project called Sew For Love, in which they sewed needed items for local charities.

Nilisha Baid had heard about the opportunity through her Girl Scouts troop. She had met the Sew For Love organizer at Girl Scouts events and had been wanting to volunteer. So she decided to ask some of her classmates to join her at this year’s 12th annual Sew For Love, which was held on a weekend during the Presidents’ Week break.

She and classmates Ankita Kundu, Advika Phadnis, Pramiti Sankar and Arushi Saxena joined other volunteers who were working in teams on various projects.

Whether busy at the sewing machine, scissors-cutting, hand-sewing or threading, Sew For Love volunteers combined their efforts to produce 871 items in just two days. Completed items included child and adult quilts, pet beds, tote and drawstring bags, fleece hats, bean bag chairs, and small “Pocket Love Bears.”

More details about the Sew For Love project can be found here.

July 21, 2014Tags: greater good, Lower School, volunteering