Torch - Fall 2012

Students Act Now: Student Voice and Innovation

The Institute’s First Student Innovation Award Presented to WalletFarm

At this year’s Upper School Awards Ceremony, the Institute at Havergal presented the first ever Student Innovation Award to WalletFarm founders: Julia Hou, Lucy Luo, Cynthia Zhou and Jennifer Chen. These students produced felt wallets that resemble cows and other farm animals to raise funds for World Vision.

The purpose of this new award is to honour students whose innovative thinking has had an impact on a social problem, a business problem or any other problem for which a novel solution can be found. The WalletFarm group impressed the award selection committee with the complexity of their ideas to use micro-enterprise to support micro-enterprise. Their model is sustainable both because the animals they purchase provide immediate and longer-term revenue to communities, enabling families to support themselves, and because of their commitment to working with younger students to share their learning and their approach to change. If you know a student involved in an innovative project, please send in your nomination for next year’s Innovation Award to the Forum for Change.

How Celebration Saturday Supports Our Community Partnerships

Celebration Saturday is a long-standing Havergal tradition begun by Old Girls and dating back many decades. All the proceeds raised at Celebration Saturday support Havergal’s community partnerships. Havergal’s student leaders work directly with our community partners to identify opportunities to support our partnerships. In the coming months, Havergal’s Community Council student members will allocate the funds raised at Celebration Saturday among our community partnerships. For an understanding of how we strengthen our programs, in 2011, funds raised from Celebration Saturday: • provided marketing materials, costumes and equipment for Appletree Farmers Market. • enabled ArtHeart to run after-school programming two days per week by supporting a stipend for staff. • provided food and programming costs for five communal Best Buddies events, where our students shared friendships and life experiences with their buddies. • sent one child to Camp Kirk, a camp for children with disabilities, for 14 days. • purchased a class set of 12 iPads and provided professional development training for Derrydown teachers on applications and functionalities of iPads at Derrydown Public School. • provided supplies and resources for a shared project to explore Canadian citizenship for Grenoble Public School, which is located in Flemington Park, a community of new Canadians.

• provided graphic novels to support the after school literacy program at Lawrence Heights Middle School, where our students volunteer and work with their buddies on reading and homework.

• provided three shelves for the books used in the literacy program at Lotherton Pathways, a table for the ANC program space and three tents for community festivals. • supported Moorelands Baby Bundles Program by providing basic baby supplies and clothes to new mothers in Flemingdon Park. • provided a small salary and professional development for Siyawela Ark’s “local One Laptop Per Child hero” Portia to develop the OLPC program, which we introduced at the Nurturing Orphans of AIDS for Humanity (NOAH) Arks. • provided 60 pairs of running shoes, T-shirts, books and school supplies for the Public School location where we volunteer at the Running and Reading Program as a part of Start2Finish. • provided spoken word workshops, art supplies, lunches and snacks for Trails Youth Initiatives participants in our shared programming. • provided new textbooks for our partner, the Whittlesea GAP school, as a part of the Triangle of Hope program that supports the rapidly changing curriculum in South Africa.

FALL 2012 THE TORCH 13