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Home » Community Service
Charles Wright has high expectations for our students as citizens of our school, community, country and world. We believe that learning how to make the world a better place is fundamental to providing challenging, rewarding and joyous training for a life well-lived and empowers our students to achieve their personal best in mind, body, and spirit. Our community service program helps students of every age understand and address the needs of others.
Throughout the curriculum, students examine social and environmental issues in the classroom and explore their power to positively impact the world. Students are encouraged to identify issues they care about such as hunger, homelessness, childhood poverty, international human rights, developmental disabilities, climate change and environmental sustainability and learn how they can help solve or alleviate these problems through direct action, community organizing and democratic processes. In and out of the classroom, Charles Wright strives to develop students’ knowledge and awareness of the world around them, while at the same time inspiring them to take positive action.
Lower School
In the Lower School, students are asked daily to consider the feelings and experiences of their classmates and to conscientiously strive to be contributing members of the Charles Wright community. They are also challenged to understand the needs of the world around them through weekly chapel lessons and class service projects tied to the academic curriculum.
For instance, as students begin to develop an understanding of hunger and poverty, they participate in the Lower School’s partnership with the Food Connection’s Food Bank in a Backpack program. Each week CWA Kindergarteners load up backpacks with a weekend’s worth of donated food. The backpacks are sent home on Fridays with students in the Tacoma area whose families cannot afford nutritious meals on the days they are not served through the free and reduced-cost lunch programs at local schools.
Another long-standing partnership in the Lower School is between the fourth grade classes and L’Arche. Working throughout the year alongside developmentally disabled adults at the L’Arche farm and garden, CWA students develop a strong connection with these members of their community and an appreciation for all they are capable of doing.
Middle School
In the Middle School, engaging hands-on community service projects are carefully developed by faculty to relate directly to the curriculum. Because CWA’s sixth grade curriculum centers on environmental sustainability, sixth grade classes have a long tradition of removing ivy and other invasive plants from Chambers Creek. It’s just the sort of action-oriented project that captures the attention of Middle Schoolers and over nearly ten years they’ve made a real difference in caring for the creek near the school. They have also developed any number of creative ways of proudly displaying and disposing of the giant pile of vegetation they build each time they visit Chambers Creek.
Seventh and eighth grade students tackle community service projects several times a year. In their small advisory groups, they work the L’Arche farm and garden, continuing the relationships many established in fourth grade at CWA, visit the elderly residents at the Tacoma Lutheran Retirement Community, and go bowling with developmentally disabled adults from TACID.
Middle Schoolers also adopt families in need each holiday season. Together they buy gifts of household items, clothes, educational supplies and toys for about a dozen local families.
Upper School
Community Service in the Upper School becomes more individualized as students develop their passion for particular school, social and environmental concerns. Each student must complete a set number of community service each year and they have many opportunities to do projects on and off campus, including numerous Winterim service offerings. At the annual awards assembly, students who have completed more than 50 hours of service are honored and those who have completed over 100 hours of service receive special recognition.
School-based service projects are organized by elected class community service representatives working with the school’s community service coordinator, Chaplain and other faculty. One of the school’s big service projects is Chapel Home, a partnership with Catholic Community Services Phoenix Housing Network that brings homeless families with children to campus twice a week for a week-long stay in the school’s chapel. Students and the families help with set-up and clean-up, prepare meals and eat with their guests, and plan evening activities and entertainment.
Each December, students organize and host a big holiday party for a group of families in need they are chosen to sponsor. They shop for food and gifts, cook the meal themselves and entertain their guests throughout the evening.
Tussock Moth Day (don’t even ask about the name, it’s a very long story and no one is 100% sure where it came from anyway) is a long-standing tradition at CWA. Originally students took a beautiful spring day off from classes to help clean up and maintain the campus. Today some students work on campus, but most go out into the community to do one-day community service projects with lots of other organizations.
Charles Wright has high expectations for our students as citizens of our school, community, country and world. We believe that learning how to make the world a better place is fundamental to providing challenging, rewarding and joyous training for a life well-lived and empowers our students to achieve their personal best in mind, body, and spirit. Our community service program helps students of every age understand and address the needs of others.
Throughout the curriculum, students examine social and environmental issues in the classroom and explore their power to positively impact the world. Students are encouraged to identify issues they care about such as hunger, homelessness, childhood poverty, international human rights, developmental disabilities, climate change and environmental sustainability and learn how they can help solve or alleviate these problems through direct action, community organizing and democratic processes. In and out of the classroom, Charles Wright strives to develop students’ knowledge and awareness of the world around them, while at the same time inspiring them to take positive action.
Lower School
In the Lower School, students are asked daily to consider the feelings and experiences of their classmates and to conscientiously strive to be contributing members of the Charles Wright community. They are also challenged to understand the needs of the world around them through weekly chapel lessons and class service projects tied to the academic curriculum.
For instance, as students begin to develop an understanding of hunger and poverty, they participate in the Lower School’s partnership with the Food Connection’s Food Bank in a Backpack program. Each week CWA Kindergarteners load up backpacks with a weekend’s worth of donated food. The backpacks are sent home on Fridays with students in the Tacoma area whose families cannot afford nutritious meals on the days they are not served through the free and reduced-cost lunch programs at local schools.
Another long-standing partnership in the Lower School is between the fourth grade classes and L’Arche. Working throughout the year alongside developmentally disabled adults at the L’Arche farm and garden, CWA students develop a strong connection with these members of their community and an appreciation for all they are capable of doing.
Middle School
In the Middle School, engaging hands-on community service projects are carefully developed by faculty to relate directly to the curriculum. Because CWA’s sixth grade curriculum centers on environmental sustainability, sixth grade classes have a long tradition of removing ivy and other invasive plants from Chambers Creek. It’s just the sort of action-oriented project that captures the attention of Middle Schoolers and over nearly ten years they’ve made a real difference in caring for the creek near the school. They have also developed any number of creative ways of proudly displaying and disposing of the giant pile of vegetation they build each time they visit Chambers Creek.
Seventh and eighth grade students tackle community service projects several times a year. In their small advisory groups, they work the L’Arche farm and garden, continuing the relationships many established in fourth grade at CWA, visit the elderly residents at the Tacoma Lutheran Retirement Community, and go bowling with developmentally disabled adults from TACID.
Middle Schoolers also adopt families in need each holiday season. Together they buy gifts of household items, clothes, educational supplies and toys for about a dozen local families.
Upper School
Community Service in the Upper School becomes more individualized as students develop their passion for particular school, social and environmental concerns. Each student must complete a set number of community service each year and they have many opportunities to do projects on and off campus, including numerous Winterim service offerings. At the annual awards assembly, students who have completed more than 50 hours of service are honored and those who have completed over 100 hours of service receive special recognition.
School-based service projects are organized by elected class community service representatives working with the school’s community service coordinator, Chaplain and other faculty. One of the school’s big service projects is Chapel Home, a partnership with Catholic Community Services Phoenix Housing Network that brings homeless families with children to campus twice a week for a week-long stay in the school’s chapel. Students and the families help with set-up and clean-up, prepare meals and eat with their guests, and plan evening activities and entertainment.
Each December, students organize and host a big holiday party for a group of families in need they are chosen to sponsor. They shop for food and gifts, cook the meal themselves and entertain their guests throughout the evening.
Tussock Moth Day (don’t even ask about the name, it’s a very long story and no one is 100% sure where it came from anyway) is a long-standing tradition at CWA. Originally students took a beautiful spring day off from classes to help clean up and maintain the campus. Today some students work on campus, but most go out into the community to do one-day community service projects with lots of other organizations.
