By Elisabeth Seiple
The Knightly News talked to the creators of the school’s new community service policy, Jane Olsen ‘20, Sophie Kielian ‘20, and Anna Faulkner ‘20, about the process they went through to propose the policy and about what they hope to accomplish with it. Last week, we also sent out a survey asking you for your questions about the policy. Those answers are here as well.
KN: When did you first come up with the idea for Engage for Change?
JO: It was kind of a combination of things; we were just realizing how little everyone was doing.
AF: I was trying to make a social justice page for the yearbook, and I ended up only getting like two photos of people doing community service.
JO: What really tipped it off was when we came back from the junior trip, and, for example, the immigration trip started volunteering at New Sanctuary. Everyone was so passionate about their issues but didn’t know how to get involved.
AF: Basically the first thing we did was, we had a brainstorm session with [LREI Cares], and we started mapping out the idea of the events and the forms and all of the ideas, and then we met with Allison and Margaret and presented our idea and they were really interested and they said ‘yes, we can do this.’ We met with them a few more times over the summer for logistical things like creating the forms, and we met with them at the end of the summer to make sure everything was formalized. Basically everything came out of that session [with LREI Cares].
KN: Were there any major challenges during the planning process?
SK: A little bit of a challenge was finding organizations to partner with because you have to be of a certain age, or they’ll give you automated responses back, and we were trying to get into contact with organizations we could have a long term partnership with.
JO: It was also really important that we had them spread out over the boroughs so that it wasn’t just centered around the school.
SK: But we had like no pushback from the administration.
JO: [Allison and Margaret] had also started the Commons Project at the same time so that kind of worked out well.
AF: [The Commons and Engage for Change] were always really separate projects that just happened to work really well.
Question from the Student Survey: While the policy of tracking community service by events instead of hours can prevent students from trying to run out the clock, is it possible that it can also lead students to take on events that require less commitment or dedication?
AF: Yeah, it definitely is possible, but I think that in any situation, kids that want to slack off will always find a way to, but we think that this is really encouraging for kids who want to work to get in touch with the organization.
JO: It also has to be like 45 minutes or so, so we’re hoping that in that time they’ll want to be more engaged.
Question from the Student Survey: Will there be a way for me to track my community service progress/amount of events I have attended? Is there a space/website provided to get information about events?
AF: Using the form system when someone submits their forms, we collect those forms, and then during Engage for Change, we sort those and we have a spreadsheet and we track the events. So, for example, I was just entering all the Climate March events.
KN: Will that be visible to everyone?
SK: So far, no, I don’t know if we want everyone to have access to what everyone is doing. But people can contact their grade reps and see how many events they have left, and they will remind people at the end of the trimester to make sure they complete it on time.
KN: What do you do during the Engage for Change X-Block?
JO: One of the things we’re hoping to do is have the group members in the club go to organizations we’re interested in to do kind of a test run to see if they think it would be good to open up to the whole school.
SK: We put upcoming events in the emails and also have kind of a master list of organizations.
AF: The administration doesn’t run the program at all, they basically agreed to enforce it, but we do all of the work. We find the opportunities, we organize the forms, we find the organizations.
KN: What kinds of organizations have you partnered with?
AF: So far we have partnerships with the Bowery Mission, New Sanctuary, Go Project, and Sean Casey animal shelter.
SK: There’s a community garden/composting organization, so in the spring, they’re opening up their garden and we’ll have stuff there.
KN: Has there been a lot of pushback from the student body?
AF: A little bit. I have been booed twice now, out loud, to my face. Once in math class, and once at the march. They started a shame chant.
JO: Also when people do that type of stuff, we talk to them and ask them why they’re doing that. The requirement we have is really a minimum, we hope that people do more than that. The fact that people aren’t even willing to do that, like we’re hoping to build on the requirement next year, so it could be higher next year.
KN: What are the long-term goals of Engage for Change?
AF: [Creating] a culture of action, not just saying.
JO: Our goal isn’t to have LREI [be engaged] just for the reputation of being engaged, but we want people to know that LREI will go to their organizations.
JO: One of the things we’re looking to do is to eventually have a website. So if someone doesn’t know about an organization, they can see some photos and see a write up about what people did when they went there.
If you have further questions about Engage for Change, let them know at engage@lrei.org.