Service Projects
Opportunities to serve throughout the year
Throughout the year students are presented with opportunities to give in a variety of ways. There are some service projects that have become anchor points for the school: the baby food collection in the fall, the produce given to the shelter at Thanksgiving, gifts for children during Advent, a money collection for a global cause during Lent, pizza days throughout the year.
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Service is not only an opportunity, but an expectation. |
Interspersed among these are projects that classes sponsor in connection with a perceived need. Service is bigger than just five projects a year. All these projects vary in their timing from a single day collection to a six week effort.
Projects need to be meaningful to those who sponsor them. The passion behind the felt need is what motivates one to be a cheerful giver. Students address real problems and generate real products. Service projects should be revisited and changed as needed, and new ones should be introduced as opportunities arise - planting bulbs in the wake of 9/11 or singing at a funeral are not planned projects but responsive acts that can happen within a flexible school structure.
Mustard Seed School sees service as a way of life. The hope is that nine years of service at the school becomes a seedbed for students to be responsive to the world they live in. Throughout our many events and celebrations we are reminded of God's goodness to us. Our service allows us to respond in gratitude and share that goodness with others. All of us become not just receivers, but stewards of all we are given. In a society that all too often encourages a "give me" attitude, our students are empowered and experience the blessing of giving. At Mustard Seed service happens all the time.
Ways in which children experience service at the school
Projects that build a relationship with the community in which we live:
Baby food collection
Baby clothes for needy mothers
Produce for the shelter
Placemats for the shelter
Toiletries and towels for the shelter
Band aids for children that are HIV
The MLK Jr. march
Doing projects
His Toy Store - collecting, cleaning, selling used toys
Street concert by the chorus to collect money for Nicaragua
Stocking shelves in the pantry
Chorus singing in front of burned buildings or at a funeral
Letters to relief workers
Letters to prisoners
Walks for CROP and AIDS
Collections of money
Lenten collections for wells in Africa
Doors for Habitat for Humanity
Cashew trees for the Mustard Seed orphanage in Africa
Love loaves
Heifer Project
Peter Fish
Projects that connect us with the world
Disaster relief
Pizza proceeds for our companion school in Nicaragua
Books for a school in Capetown
Advocacy (Bread for the World letters)
Civic service - Planting bulbs in the park
Letters to political figures
"Dimes for the Dome" in Trenton
Save the whales
rainforest acres
