Torch - Spring 2018

SOCIAL Support

From social giving to educating the community to LGBTQ+ trail-blazing

Grade 6 students at the Red Door Family Shelter with their donations.

S ocial support at Havergal means many things. It’s having friends who you know will support you through anything. It’s taking stewardship of an event and making it the best ever. It’s knowing if you come up with an idea for a giving project, you can find the support to make it happen. When Grade 6 students Ava Daniel and Emerson Southam started collecting clothing and other essentials for the Red Door Family Shelter, they started with a box so big they never thought they would fill it. They did. “I actually had to crawl inside of the box to get all of the stuff out because it was so big and we filled it right to the top,” says Southam with pride. The girls chose the Red Door as their fundraising destination because it supports all types of families. Working with their classmates, the girls assembled everything from hats to mitts to scarves, assigning the collection of each to different grades and classes. Alongside the other members of their organizing team (Scarlett Nowakowski, Fiona Bellamy, Aryana Kay, Nicole Gong and Kirsten Griffin-Sobotik), the girls also got to visit the Red Door’s sorting facility and asked questions about the shelter. Once they had finished collecting donations, the girls decorated shoeboxes for the recipients. “We made them all pretty and packed everything in and off they went.

We asked everybody to bring in at least one shoebox and then we had one recess when 42 girls came and started wrapping all the boxes,” says Daniel. By the time they finished, there were 80 boxes! Daniel says she liked the whole process of helping others. Southam adds that she also liked the fact that the project was supported, but the students had a lot of freedom to tackle it on their own. “I liked that it was just us. The teacher helped, but it was all us kids. It wasn’t the teacher who said, ‘We’re going do this, and then this. And then we’re done.’ It was actually us who did it,” says Southam. Spoken Word for Tokens 4 Change As important as starting something new is stewarding an existing success. This year, Grade 12 students Alex Salom and Sarah Zhao participated with their peers in Tokens 4 Change, a city-wide fundraiser that Havergal joined in 2013 to raise money for Youth Without Shelter. On one of the coldest days of the winter this year, they stood on a street corner at the Yonge and Eglinton asking for change while performing spoken word poetry. They describe it as difficult and eye-opening. “It gives you a sense of what being ignored feels like,” says Salom. “When somebody just walks past you as if you weren’t

standing there. And you’re performing and people are walking because they are more concerned about getting to work.” She adds that the scenario was made even more real by an actual homeless person sitting across from the group also asking for change. “That kind of just put it all into perspective as to why we were doing this.” With the goal of providing homeless youth with TTC tokens so they can get to school or work, the Havergal participants also gained something from this experience. “As the girls learn about youth homelessness, they are motivated by the knowledge to promote change,” Senior School Drama teacher Risa Morris explains. “Representatives from local youth shelters led workshops about youth homelessness for our students.” In the weeks prior, spoken word artist Lamoi Simmonds led a spoken word workshop at Havergal to help students write and learn to perform their own works, part of a unit in drama class called Theatre as Activism. “I really love slam poetry,” says Zhao. “It’s a great combination of writing and drama while getting a message across. I think it has so much potential to be emotional and it really hit home with me.” Salom, who was directing and stage- managing school plays in the same term as the fundraiser, agrees. “I am always drawn to the ones that have a message. I watch a lot of ones that deal with either sexual

TABLE OF CONTENTS | SPRING 2018 • TORCH 21