Getting Behind Community Service with Our Minds and Hearts

Typically, we refer to our mission statement when we justify our community service requirement at Nightingale.“Through the arts and athletics, ample leadership opportunities, extracurricular activities, and community service, Nightingale students are encouraged to discover and to demonstrate that the mind and heart are equally important, and that one is empty without the other.”

And we are correct. We put our heart into service work—being in contact with those whose needs are greater than our own, whose needs are incomprehensible to us, pulls at our heartstrings. Service work makes us better human beings. Statistics abound: Azim Jamal and Harvey McKinnon, in their book The Power of Giving, How Giving Back Enriches Us All refer to a 1988 article in American Health that talks about increased life expectancy in those who volunteer regularly.

It makes us feel good, but we also use our minds. How can we help to alleviate some of the problems we are encountering in our volunteer work? Where are the long-term solutions? Thinking about this is what brought to fruition the new service requirements and service learning class in the Upper School; they are the foundation of the approach to any service learning we add to our curriculum.

In Class IX, community service begins in the classroom. There is a required course entitled Civic Engagement and Social Leadership that occurs once a week on Friday mornings. On alternating weeks, the girls are in the classroom at Nightingale or up at the Sisulu-Walker Charter School on 115th Street and Lenox Avenue. In the classroom we are reflecting upon what has happened up at Sisulu, exploring topics of civic duty, responsibility, volunteerism, and philanthropy. Each girl, along with a partner, is required to choose a not-for-profit organization and present its cause and mission to the class. At Sisulu, our girls are working with fourth- and fifth-grade students on Harlem history projects, community newsletters, and math enrichment. It is a mutually beneficial program in which our girls get to be role models, leaders, and mentors while they are discovering and learning with students just a few years younger than themselves.

During the rest of their time in Upper School, the requirement is now to make a sustained, regular commitment to one organization. In Class X, the commitment must last the entire year, and in Classes XI and XII, for one semester. The girls can still fulfill this requirement at Nightingale by giving tours or being a lunch buddy (among other tasks), but they must spend at least one of their years outside the blue doors. At the end of each year, girls will be considered not by how many hours they’ve put in but by whether they have done something consistent. We hope their experience will be more substantial, more meaningful to them personally. Getting to know people in an organization, learning about the not-for-profit world, trying to figure out root causes to a problem—all of this will help them to use their minds and hearts to work toward betterment or even a solution.

Finally, the Upper School is involved in a new philanthropy initiative through Interschool. Each grade in the Upper School will choose a charity and present to the entire school community why their charity should be chosen to receive $2,500, money that was donated for this purpose. Each class will work together to choose the charity, connect with the charity, and research exactly how the money will be used. This promises to be not just a community-building exercise but a way for the girls to learn to advocate for a cause they believe in. It should be very interesting!

One last note: Over the summer I read an inspiring and fascinating book called The Power of Half by father and daughter Kevin and Hannah Salwen. The book takes the reader on a journey with the Salwen family who decides to sell their very large home in Atlanta and move into a smaller one. They take half of the profits from the home sale and donate it to a charity. The interesting part of the journey is how the family comes to decide which charity to donate to and how, as a family, they feel more connected and more wealthy, while living in half the space they used to. I highly recommend it!

—Kristen Mulvoy, Director of Community Service