By Christie Goode, VP of Advancement
OK, I admit it. I cry easily.
My kids watch me carefully during movies, and often ask if I’m crying. Yes. Friends at church know it. Former colleagues at previous workplaces know it. Lots of people know it: I’m a bit soft.
So no one will be surprised to hear that in June when I visited Surrey Christian Elementary School to represent A Rocha at a celebration of their “Belonging Bench Project” – yes, I cried.
I couldn’t help it. I was wandering around the gymnasium, looking at 20 completely different benches that the students had designed specifically to nurture connection and belonging in their communities.
It had been a months-long project, with 120 grade 6 & 7 students from Surrey Christian working in small groups to find a not-for-profit organization that served the local community, and provide them with a custom-made bench that reflected “the deep hope of the organization”.
They were projects completely run by the students themselves: all the research, communication with local organizations, and design and construction of the benches, was all done by the students. The idea was to nurture a sense of belonging:
- that the students would start to feel connections to the wider community;
- that the organizations would feel a sense of belonging at Surrey Christian, as the students learned and shared and lived the organization’s vision & stories
- and that the custom bench would help the organization itself cultivate belonging, because having a bench inherently communicates “come and be with us”.
So the students who chose to reach out to A Rocha and create a bench for the Brooksdale Environmental Centre, decided not to make a new bench out of new materials, but to restore an old, worn out, wrought-iron bench. (You know, reduce, re-use, re-cycle.) They repaired and repainted the bench, and added a quote across the top from Steven Bouma-Prediger: “We care for only what we love. We love only what we know. We truly know only what we experience.”
I cried because the intention of the teachers in proposing such a big and independent project for their students was just so beautiful. As one teacher put it, “This way of being is how we want to be in the community, whether we are 12 or 22 or 42 or 82.”
I cried because the project conveyed such hope for the future, to see 120 eleven and twelve year-olds even thinking about the “deep hope” that non-profits add to a community, let alone reaching out and learning about what that hope was.
And I cried because A Rocha was included – we are part of a wider community, a network of people of faith, of uncertain faith, and of no articulated faith all across our city and our country who are actively working to make our world better.
Some days it is hard to see the light overcoming the darkness. But not on this day.
