We are Charlie Patel and Atlas Kosedag. After being involved in many community service projects and activities in the past, we have been very well-versed in community service. We have also seen many seniors who have yet to earn their necessary hours to graduate, and realised that there were many difficulties when it came to accessing community service in the past. We wanted that issue gone, and we wanted to make sure that anyone can access opportunities at any time. With this in mind, we decided to create a committee that focuses on just that: making community service easy to access. Of course, this committee has evolved into much more than just that, but this was the main goal of our committee, and we will stay true to this goal for many years to come.
As a result of our inquiry, we created the Servant Leadership Committee (SLC) as our Senior Ventures Project. This committee is a student-run organization that motivates students to become more involved in community service on and off campus. We, as a committee, aim to bridge the gap between students and community service opportunities, and make community service as accessible as possible. We also aim to add more structure to how community service is offered at Darlington and make serving the community easier for everyone. We will provide students with a place to find specific information about certain events, including the location, time, and details regarding each event so our main purpose can be fulfilled.
As of now, we have accomplished so many things that are already beginning to change the game. With the creation of our SLC website, community service has become more accessible than ever. We provide a Community Service Sign-up Form that acts as a place for students to sign up for each event, done through a Google Form that will require necessary information that ranges from a student's name to a specific role one would want to participate in. We have also launched an Instagram page that advertises each event, which will continue to push community service out to as many people as possible. We also organized a Hurricane Relief Drive for Hurricane Helene that provided almost $10,000 in donations for those who were affected by the hurricane; a food drive with the Salvation Army that provided canned supplies to those in need in Georgia; and provided structure for all community service opportunities through our website, making everything community service-related so much easier.
In the future, we aim to remain as the bridge between service and students, providing as many community service opportunities as possible to the student body, and help through drives and other kinds of service projects. We also look forward to hosting large-scale events in the near future, one of which was an event from the past that we look to bring back: Light the Lake. This is an event that honors and remembers members of the Darlington Community who have battled or are currently battling cancer. Light the Lake was a tradition at Darlington for many years. It is our goal to relight this flame and set up those luminaries to light the lake!
This team means everything to us, and we look forward to working with everyone to really make a change and have positive effects in our community. As this is a Senior Ventures Project, we will be gone next year and won’t be able to participate and help develop this committee anymore, but we have built this program for longevity, and plan to come back in 5 to 10 years as alumni and still see our creation serving the community in as many ways as possible!
Senior Ventures is a year-long academic program built on a framework of leadership, innovation and community engagement. Through a proven self-guided exploratory process, seniors whose proposals are selected for this program work independently to develop a project that’s interdisciplinary in scope and is connective, performance-based, investigative, or entrepreneurial. Click here to learn more.
