When I began teaching leadership one of the traditional events students were asked to lead was a charity event. It makes sense, leaders should be charitable and help out the community. My students decided to create an event to help a popular local charity. During the week long event in December the students raised over $2500. Due to financial procedures a school district has to follow and the winter holiday break we did not get a check cut for the charity until January. I set up a time to present the check to the manager of the charity and had students deliver the check. The students returned upset. Apparently the charity manager was upset about not getting the check in December because now it complicates his budget. He did not even thank them.
All the ‘charity’ work they did and they were left with a negative experience. I had to figure this out. If you are doing charity, should you expect a thank you? If you spend weeks working on an event and you are left with a negative feeling, did they learn anything meaningful? The questions started getting bigger and harder. Why do charity? What does it mean to be charitable? What did I want my students to learn about charity? The only thing I did know is that I did not want this to be how they experienced charity. Here is what I learned:
I started calling charities around the world to see if this personal story and relationship of charity could be built. Call after call, charity after charity, told me no. Charities are set up to tell their story, receive donations, and solve the problem themselves. The only relationship the charities I called knew was the traditional donation model. One day, after school, after another failed call to a charity, I sat defeated. Ping, I got an email.
A kindergarten student in our district had cancer and her teachers were asking people if they would join a charity walk to help raise money for her family. I called the girls teachers and asked if my leadership class could help and they gratefully accepted. The five year old girl had a brain stem glioma, a terminal cancer, and the experimental treatments the family had been flying her around the country to undertake had racked up medical bills in the hundreds of thousands. This little girl was not going to make it and we only raised $2500 the year before. I did not know If it was even fair to ask a group of high school students to take on a cause so emotional and overwhelming…but I had to ask.
I remember one of my students answered, how can we not do this, she is one of us. The students were all in. We met with the family because we did not want to act without their blessing. They let us into their lives, their struggle, and together we began to fight. The student’s took up the banner of this little girl and carried it forward. The students created an entire campaign around this little girl. Not only did all the students join in, all the schools joined in, the entire community moved, and other communities around the state began to join in this cause. Where the year before student’s raised $2500 for charity, this year the students raised over $30,000 in one week for a family.
The family came to speak to all the students at our high school. When they spoke they told the students they were thankful for the money, but they were significantly more thankful for the love the student’s showed them and their five year old little girl. The family explained how the fight against cancer was exhausting and lonely, but now they no longer felt alone and were stronger for the community these students showed them. This was personal. This was a bigger story. This was relational. This is charity.
A few months later, the little girl would lose her battle. I remember being in a churched packed with her community and seeing the power of real charity built on relationships. After the funeral we met with the family and they asked if they could continue the charity work we had begun. To this day the family and that charity has raised over $250,000 to fight against childhood cancer. This is the power of true charity.
On the families website (http://advokaterun.org) there is a line at the bottom that reads “The AdvoKate name was attributed to Kate’s cause in 2006 by the Avondale High School Leadership group.”
