All around the world, there are people who need resources, education, funds, even a safe place to live. Although students at St. Paul Academy and Summit School can’t help everyone in need, Service Day, organized by Community Action and Service (CAS), aimed to improve the local community. The day dedicated to service provided worthwhile service opportunities for students unable to find them elsewhere, since most organizations have age limits for unsupervised volunteers

This is the first time SPA has conducted an event like this, even though the old mission statement lists service as one of the main goals of this institution, saying that “[SPA] educates a diverse and motivated group of young people for leadership and service… helps them lead productive, ethical, and joyful lives.” The lack of fixed service opportunities in SPA, despite service being one of our core values, is astonishing, and should be changed.

Noticing that service, or volunteer work wasn’t a part of daily, or even annual, life at SPA for the majority of the student body, CAS co-presidents Alex Miller and Anna Carlson decided late last year, before the mission statement was changed, that the role of service in the SPA community needed to be altered and creating a service day was the best way to do that.

“The view of service at SPA has been negative, kind of like a chore… [The student body] should be able to pick what they want to do, have a day dedicated to it. We’re hoping people will go do something, like it, hopefully come back and do more,” Miller said.

Carlson agreed, saying “we wanted to change the negative connotation people associate volunteering with in the SPA community. The hands-on approach [in Service Day] is supposed to show that you can make a difference and an impact–people don’t realize that they can.”

Although SPA aims to be “shaping the minds and the hearts of those who will change the world,” the popular interpretation of this goal seems to focus a lot more on doing exceptionally well academically rather than helping the local community. With the introduction of Service Day, the challenge presented to the SPA community is to view “changing the world” not only in terms of academic achievement, but also as a goal saying that we should try to help the people around us and make a positive impact. Service Day, hopefully a future bi-annual event, will help us do just that.

“We got really positive feedback after signup… [CAS] wanted to give it [service] more attention and focus, to look at it as more of an established part of the program at SPA, like other private schools do,” CAS advisor Jutta Crowder said, and she’s right. According to Crowder, Breck has a service afternoon every month and so do other private schools just like SPA. It’s about time we stepped up and made a difference.