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Serving Our Local Community
It’s one of Shawnigan’s smallest arts and activities groups, but it has a big impact.
Run by Mrs. Andrea Carballo, Ms. Pema Yangchen and Rev. Ruth Dantzer, the Service 360 consists of just 12 Grade 12 students – it would be hard to accommodate more than that – who give their time for the benefit of the larger Cowichan Valley community. Many of the ideas for where and who to serve come from the students themselves.
On Mondays, half of the group visits the Cerwydden Seniors Community in Duncan. Three months into the year, the students have developed close relationships with the residents. Certain residents gravitate to certain students, and vice versa – a group of German-speaking residents, for example, love talking to the Shawnigan students who are fluent in their language. According to Mrs. Carballo, it is the “highlight of the week” for the residents.
While those six are at Cerwydden, the other six go to work with Nourish Cowichan, an organization that provides breakfast, lunch and snacks for thousands of kids across the Cowichan Valley, and prepares hundreds of food hampers for local families. For the most part, those students are peeling and cutting fruit and vegetables, but they have other duties as well.
Wednesdays also see part of the group work with Nourish Cowichan, while the others go to the Clements Centre, which serves children, youth, and adults with developmental disabilities and their families. The students engage in a number of different activities with the people the Clements Centre serves – a recent visit included playing Christmas bingo and singing carols. They have become good friends with some of the people the Clements Centre serves, and brought some of them to the School just before Halloween to enjoy trick-or-treating in the Main Building.
One of the individuals from the Clements Centre’s Supported Employment Program, Josh, has started working in the School’s maintenance department, helping to sort recyclables. Another client, Cody, will be starting a job at the School soon, delivering food to the Houses.
In addition to those weekly opportunities, the Service group helps the Meals on the Ground program based at Duncan United Church, feeding as many as 100 homeless people. They have also helped raise money for the Clements Centre and Nourish Cowichan, and restocked shelves at the Cowichan Valley Basket Society, the food bank in Duncan. Recently, the group has worked with a First Nations elder in Duncan, doing housework around his place and helping chop and stack wood for his sweat lodge, as well as helping with Lelum ’u to S’tsa’-elh teyt-en (the House of Honourable Mothers), a residential program that supports mothers during pregnancy and the first year of parenting and an initiative of the Hiiye’yu Lelum (House of Friendship) Society.
We acknowledge with respect the Coast Salish Peoples on whose traditional lands and waterways we live, learn and play. We are grateful for the opportunity to share in this beautiful region, and we aspire to healthy and respectful relationships with those who have lived on and cared for these lands for millennia.
Shawnigan Lake School is an independent co-educational boarding school for ages 13 –18 on Canada’s beautiful West Coast. Our diverse, interdisciplinary and innovative programming helps shape the next generation of global leaders.
