Coummunity Service

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Everyone Gains From Community Service

Seek to do good for others, and you will find fulfillment. Forget yourself, and you will discover what you are seeking.

—from Always We Begin Again, The Benedictine Way of Living

It’s volunteer work with the sick, the hungry and the helpless. Reading with the young or the elderly, or saving animals and sand dunes, or raising awareness and money to fight scary diseases. Community service has many definitions

At the Priory, it doesn’t wear a gloomy face. This year, it started with brightly colored balloons, radiant sunshine, clever “everybody-wins” games and prizes, and about a dozen information booths staffed by people from local service agencies. The Campus Ministry Club arranged the school’s first Community Service Fair on Red Square early last fall. Their goal was to help students make thoughtful choices as they began working through their required 20 hours of community service, said Julia Duncan, club spokesperson.

Like many schools, Woodside Priory has a service requirement for graduation—five hours at a class service day, 10 hours at an off-campus organization of the student’s choice, and an additional five hours that the student can invest with the same organization or, optionally, with a fund-raising or on-campus activity.

Responsibility for finding a satisfying 10 to 15 hour project rests largely with the student. Some students quickly find one, while others struggle. The requirement was knowingly designed that way. The goal is to encourage students to take their own skills and passions, and extend them, said Therese Inkmann, campus ministry coordinator.

A ski-snowboard club project in the making is a perfect example. Junior Olin Montalvo fairly radiates excitement in describing the link he is trying to develop with a Special Olympics program. Priory club members will take handicapped, very young children out on the slopes and help them learn to ski. “Ms. Payne, our advisor, suggested it. The idea is for us to do more as a club than just trips to the snow. I think this is great and I’m trying to get it organized by January,” Olin commented. For him, the service hours aren’t important—it’s the project itself that inspires him, he says.

Scratch the surface and you usually find such confidence comes from previous experience. Olin is comfortable with kids in part because he’s already been an assistant soccer coach. Brian Mansoor, who is working with Olin on the ski club project, has worked in children’s day care.

Senior Ashley Kustu took her considerable experience in figure skating and uses it to advantage with “Special Skaters” at Ice Oasis in Redwood City. Nearly every Saturday afternoon, she spends an hour helping disabled youngsters learn grace, balance and coordination on ice.

Encouraging students to form a lifelong habit of service is part of the Priory’s Benedictine mission. Asking students to develop their own projects seems more likely to foster a lifelong commitment than simply asking them to participate in pre-arranged events—although the five-hour class activity is one of the latter and valuable for other reasons, Ms. Inkmann explained.

Freshman Alicia Kriewall and junior Lauren Frasch already know about long-term commitment. Both have been active for years with the American Cancer Society and have donated countless hours to hands-on work at fund-raising and community awareness projects. Now, both also have positions in the ACS administrative structure. Lauren is chair and Alicia secretary of the ACS Youth Advisory Board in San Mateo County. To fulfill graduation requirements, they need only fill out Ms. Inkmann’s forms.

Photo by Howard Share

Far from discouraging students from “doublecounting” a service project—getting school credit for something they would be doing anyway—Ms. Inkmann thinks the intersection is ideal. For example, many students use their scouting projects to satisfy the Priory’s requirement. The point isn’t to impose additional hours, but rather to be sure that every student explores the potential of service, she explained.

Students get their ideas from club and church activities, from lessons and sports, from a meaningful personal experience, and from family commitments. Students who don’t find inspiration in those venues can turn to one of the service fair organizations or follow up on ideas in the community service calendar. It is posted on the school Web site.

Urban Ministries, which provides services to the mid-Peninsula homeless population, is a popular service site for Priory students. Many students tutor or support reading programs at Portola Valley, Los Altos, and Belmont libraries. Other popular venues include Rebuilding Together home renovation, Red Cross, Safe Rides (transportation for young people who have been drinking and think they should not drive), Pets in Need, scouting, and Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula, and BOK Ranch (a stable with a therapeutic/recreational riding program for handicapped children).

Under the watchful eye of a nurse, a child at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital checks out the tutus of sophomore Laura Koenig and fellow dancer Rachel Matthews. Laura and other performers from the Nutcracker ballet gave mini-performances at libraries and hospitals.

“The process can start anywhere, but my hope is that eventually many of our students will become a bridge between the people who have, and those who need. Ghandi said we all can ‘be the change’ we want to see in the world, and that is the model we are trying to create here,” Ms. Inkman explained.

In the Pistritto family, Ritu’s interest in keeping productively busy when she arrived from Switzerland (where her two sons were born) eventually led to shared community service with Alex, a junior. Ritu did not take up a job, but with a university education and plenty of passionate interests, she definitely needed an outlet that would blend with her young family’s schedule, she said. Through the Internet, she found and followed up on literally dozens of volunteer opportunities in San Francisco and San Mateo County.

When Alex started ninth grade, it worked out naturally for his mom to help him find an interest, then stay and work alongside (“Not always directly with, though - I want him to have his own satisfaction and independent strength of reaching out as well”). Alex’s preliminary interest in working with the homeless and seniors led to a San Francisco soup kitchen, a temple in Livermore, and the senior center in Belmont, and then to a wide range of other projects in a variety of fields.

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Kids Can Free the Children members held a cocoa-with-marshmallows fund-raiser during the cold weeks of December. Members are part of an international organization that aims to protect children from exploitation.

The two have done six or seven projects together since Alex started high school, and many more before that, “but we didn’t think of it as community service then, and we didn’t count hours,” Ritu said. “It was just our way of trying to help out in any small way we could,” she explained.

Ritu now looks forward to volunteering with her younger son Christopher, a freshman.

The graduation requirement was revised and the number of required hours reduced two years ago. In the first year, many students weren’t sure of what to do. They waited until late in the spring to get going, and the results were often less than satisfying. This year, the feedback is already more positive, largely because students learned from last year and are doing a better job of linking up community service with other parts of their lives and selves, Ms. Inkman said. The result will be richer and more meaningful experiences, she believes. Her goal for the future is to offer students yet another intersection, this time in academics—probably involving government and theology classes, she said.

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Freshman and seniors (shown here) worked at Half Moon Bay dunes restoration for their five-hour class projects. Juniors helped with sorting, cleaning and food preparation at three homeless shelters. Sophomores hosted a Special Olympics (at right) on the Priory campus for the second year in a row. An all-Middle School service project is being planned for spring. Campus Ministry Coordinator Therese Inkmann (inset photo) ties each class service day to a Benedictine theme.

Revitalizing The Alumni Association Is ‘All About Connections’

How do you get people charged up about their high school years after they’ve graduated? That’s what occupies Dave Arnold’s mind these days. A 1984 graduate of Woodside Priory, Arnold is organizing the school’s first alumni association in its 46 years.

As co-chairs of the Alumni Council, Arnold and Rob Hammond (class of 1988) have done research on the Internet to build up a database of alumni names. They are brainstorming methods of getting bygone graduates back in touch with their old school. They even have met with representatives of St. Francis High School in Mountain View and other local schools to glean tips for attracting alumni.

It’s all part of finding the key to bringing people back to the community that Arnold continues to find enriching.

“There’s a tremendous amount of history that I personally have and my family has with the school,” Arnold says, sitting at his desk at the Gorilla Search Group in Los Gatos. Arnold co-founded the executive placement company.

Arnold’s history with Woodside Priory began before he was born, with the second graduating class. Arnold is the youngest of nine children. In the early 1960s, his father, an electrical engineer and devout Catholic, thought he had a means to keep education costs down. He approached the Priory’s founding monks with a barter arrangement: He would teach algebra in exchange for tuition for his sons.

“They were ecstatic,” Arnold says. Four of the five Arnold boys attended Woodside Priory under the unique agreement. (Arnold’s parents tried to convince the monks to go coeducational, so his sisters could attend, “but they would have no part of it.”) “I think the Priory does a very good job of teaching students to be problem solvers,” says Arnold, who majored in economics at LoyolaMarymount University in Los Angeles. The teachers “really teach you to think.”

At college, “my first two years were review. It was very easy.” Arnold graduated with a degree in economics, taking enough accounting courses to land positions in finance at Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems, where he met his wife, Donna.

He left finance when he realized he didn’t have a passion for accounting and shifted his career to employment recruitment. He was a vice president with Robert Half International when he left to cofound the Gorilla Search Group.

Throughout this time, Arnold has been active with the Priory. He is a member of the Board of Trustees, the Campaign Leadership Team and the Golf Committee. And, in a moment of serendipity, he was able to connect his work life with his Priory life. He got a call asking if he knew of a good candidate to serve as dean of academics and put his “dear friend” Jennifer Martin in touch with the school.

Lately, Arnold has been busy organizing his graduating class’ 20th reunion, which will take place at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Of the 30 students in the class, Arnold is expecting at least 20 alumni, including the six international students, to attend. He’d like to see other classes approaching their reunions with as much enthusiasm.

Arnold is hoping to have each class name a class agent responsible for keeping members in touch with each other. He’d like alumni to speak at Chapel at least twice a year. He’d like the alumni to reach out to current and future Priory students, establishing a Priory network to help people make college and career decisions. And he hopes to establish regular alumni events to attract as many of the 1,100 people who have graduated from the Priory as possible.

To Arnold, the point of it all is the future. “It’s really about connections.” Priory alumni have traditionally been generous in their gifts to the school. But Arnold sees an alumni association as much more than development. It would mean student mentoring, alumni business referrals and, mostly, continuing the sense of community students enjoyed before graduation.

“You can’t just ask for money,” Arnold says. “You’ve got to do something else.”“We have already come a long way,” he says. “The future looks very bright.” —G. Young 9 Dave Arnold, Class of 1984 Lives in Los Gatos Wife: Donna Favorite activities: Gourmet cooking, wine collecting, golfing Professional field: Financial Executive placementRecruitment