By Rosie Hoile
“Without community service, we would not have a strong quality of life. It’s important to the person who serves as well as the recipient. It’s the way in which we ourselves grow and develop.”
–Dorothy Height
Cary Academy has always shown a commitment to the betterment of our community through service. Global Awareness Initiative, created by Divya Vijayakumar and other students in the tenth and eleventh grades, reflects these pillars of service in the Cary Academy community, local community, and international community. Global Awareness reflects our desire to make a difference at all levels: from the Cary Academy Community all the way up to the WISER school in Kenya.
WISER is not only a school in Kenya, but a symbol of an entire organization to the social empowerment of girls in an area where neither their education nor quality of life is valued. Studies have shown that improving a society for all starts with educating the uneducated—in this case, the tenacious and brilliant girls of Eastern and Central Africa.
As we look to contribute to our own school community, we seek to strengthen the bonds between grades and make the school as a whole more connected and aware of one-another. A mentorship program, for example, would allow underclassmen to have older, more experienced “buddies,” and it would allow upperclassmen to take on leadership roles.
The second tier of our service approach is service at the local level, providing help for local schools and organizations that need our help. This gives us an opportunity to work with other clubs and programs at Cary Academy.
This year, Global Awareness is partnering with WISER, along with the chapter at Duke and other high schools around the Triangle. This creates a community-fueled approach to helping the school through fundraising and awareness, two things that go an extremely long way, and illuminate the very purpose of Global Awareness.
“We realized that issues plaguing far corners of the Earth are also prevalent in our local community,” Divya said, in regards to why the Global Initiative Awareness club is looking so close to home, while simultaneously reaching out so far away from it. “We are often sheltered from the harsh realities of the world and [our club] aims to change that by relating seemingly far-off issues to ones closer to home.”
We’ve already raised awareness within the Cary Academy community by coordinating with Duke in hosting a session in the service fair, where we talked about what the WISER school is and outlined Global Awareness Initiative’s goals for the year. Most importantly, a lot of people walked away with the knowledge of the good that WISER is doing and hopefully, a desire to help as well.
You can help with any level of our service approach without being an official member of Global Awareness, just by joining a future mentorship program or helping us with our efforts locally with Reedy Creek or internationally with WISER.
“It’s an opportunity to improve the lives of other people in a way that’s easy for me to contribute,” said Rachel Johns (’17), when asked why a cause like WISER is important to her. “But [it] also helps other people—girls my own age—immensely.”
If you’re interested in joining the club, learning more about WISER or our club, please feel free to contact Divya Vijayakumar at divya_vijayakumar@caryacademy.org, or leave a comment below.
I was very inspired myself by the work of the WISER school and hope to help in any way possible. I remember a couple years back at CA, there was a letter-writing campaign where we each chose a girl in the WISER school to write a letter of congratulations to in regards to their success in graduating from the school. It was extremely humbling, and it almost brought me to tears in thinking about how incredible these girls really were. I hope to someday travel to Kenya and visit the WISER school to meet these strong women, but from the help of the Global Awareness Club, I’ve felt the impact of the organization all the way from North Carolina.