Community Service
Unique among independent high schools, Marlborough’s service program is completely voluntary. Rather than a graduation requirement, service is seen as a personal commitment as well as an integral part of the life of the School. Each month, a calendar of service activities is posted on the School’s web site, reminders are listed on flyers posted on two campus bulletin boards, and announcements are made at class meetings by elected student representatives.
Projects are based on four levels of action: fund-raising for non-profit agencies and projects; collection of food and other life-necessities; environmental cleanup (including the campus of the immediate community); and most important, contact with children, adults in need of assistance, the sick, and the elderly.
At each grade, a student is elected, and parent and faculty representatives volunteer to help coordinate the service calendar. Again this year, one middle and one upper school class will take the lead each month for publicizing projects and recruiting volunteers. As always, everyone is invited to participate in any project. Activities take place on campus during the school day, after school, and on weekends at sites in the Los Angeles area. It is the goal of the program that students, parents, and faculty find outlets to share their time and talents in meaningful ways.
In the 2005-2006 school year, the students extraordinarily demonstrated their voluntary commitment to serving others in need by raising over $28,000 to build a new school in Zambia, Africa for AIDS orphans.
Seventh graders have participated in the annual Math-a-thon for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, contributing well over $53,000 over a span of four years.
A partial listing of community service activities include: tutoring daily after school at the nearby 3rd Street School and Los Angeles Leadership Academy, Bookworms reading club with the Wilshire Elementary School kindergarten class, food of the month collection, 150 lunches made of homeless teens at the Covenant House Shelter and Outreach, working to distribute food at the Hope Net Pantry on Saturday mornings, Tree People, Binky Patrol, AIDS Walk (raising over $4500 for AIDS research), Denim Day (raising $2540 to the Susan G. Komen Foundation), volunteering at Adoption Day at the Children's Court House, helping set up for a Thanksgiving Dinner for 2500 at the Santa Monica Civic Center, preparing snack bags for the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition, caroling at the St. John of God Care Center, working with One Voice to pack holiday food at the Santa Monica Airport, cell phone donations, arts projects at the Shriners' Hospital, Locks of Love, Chocolate for Charity, book collection for Para Los Ninos, bake sale for hearing-impaired children, prom dress collection, Relay for Life, dinner at PATH, dance ensemble charity event, planting at the Hope Net community garden, and participation in Big Sunday.
Read more about this topic: Marlborough School (Los Angeles)
Famous quotes containing the words community and/or service:
“As blacks, we need not be afraid that encouraging moral development, a conscience and guilt will prevent social action. Black children without the ability to feel a normal amount of guilt will victimize their parents, relatives and community first. They are unlikely to be involved in social action to improve the black community. Their self-centered personalities will cause them to look out for themselves without concern for others, black or white.”
—James P. Comer (20th century)
“The more the specific feelings of being under obligation range themselves under a supreme principle of human dependence the clearer and more fertile will be the realization of the concept, indispensable to all true culture, of service; from the service of God down to the simple social relationship as between employer and employee.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)