Compassion Week

After reading the Campus Compassion Week guide, I was inspired to create a compassion week at my high school! I have been doing some volunteer work for a non-profit which benefits children with developmental disabilities and know that they could always use a little extra funding, so I thought this would be a cool way to raise some money and get other kids involved in volunteer work. Also, finding new ways to bring the campus together and be more compassionate towards each other is certainly not a bad thing!

A group of friends and I met one afternoon and had a meeting using the iSpot's Campus Compassion Week guide to structure our discussion and help us figure out how to do this. Of the group of 5 of us, one is on Student Senate, three in Leadership, and I am on the school newspaper, so we had publicity covered! We each agreed that we had to try to get at least two friends involved in making this week happen and tell our various clubs, groups, classes, and teachers on campus what we were up to. My friend Jenny said she'd run a bake sale. Andrew said he'd make fliers and put them up everywhere. I decided to write an article for the school newspaper and create a facebook event. Sam said he'd make an announcement in both senate and leadership and ask for volunteers.

The following week, we all met up again, and this time, we had three more people join. We made a list of events we wanted to run during the week: a bake sale every day at lunch, relay races in which you had to go up to someone you don't know and ask them to be your partner, a club day where each club has a booth and sign-up sheets, compassion ambassadors: members of our team who'd walk around offering free hugs and chocolate and fliers which showed a bunch of local organizations in need of volunteers, compassion take-aways (little slips of paper that say compassionate acts on them, like "Call your grandma"), in addition to other events like a school clean-up day, a teacher appreciation luncheon (paid for by the parent's association, which my friend Joey's mom is the head of!), and lots of other events.

We started planning all this out two months in advance so that we could get permission and support from parents, students, teachers, and administrators. We called up some local grocery stores and told them what we were up to and they even donated some supplies for the bakesale! All in all, this week was a success, even though we faced a few difficulties.