TEEN GROUP – COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

In a short amount of time, this club has made tremendous progress in its organization, community service, and leadership at Barker High School. Generally, students who attend this school have encountered a variety of barriers that have impacted their academic success: factors including trauma, poverty and homelessness. In a short time students of this club learned how to be effective service-oriented leaders which has helped them to be effective leaders and address issues facing their community. The first project of this group was to help organize the “Council Closet’. The idea is to provide a room that would hold clothing, personal and small household items needed for the growing number of homeless students in the district. They sorted through thousands of donated items, and created an organized room that is available for any student or family in the district. This experience allowed students to see themselves as capable of making positive change to benefit the entire community. Another project of this group is organizing “Barker Gives Back” which gathers enough food to create entire Thanksgiving meals for 60 families. They’ve also created 200 gifts for the Inland Northwest Candlelighters, 100 placemats for Meals on Wheels, and lap-blankets for Barker High School special needs students in wheel chairs. Their efforts have helped to create a sense of self-worth and value for the community as a whole.