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conuly
This model of donation really makes sense to me.
Doing a Few Chores, and Helping Bridge Bronxville and Nairobi
By WINNIE HU
BRONXVILLE, N.Y. — At 25 cents a job, or more, the children of Bronxville are laboring at home, some for the first time: cleaning their rooms, unloading the dishwasher, replacing toilet paper, pulling weeds.
It is not that they are suddenly in need of money, even if their parents’ net worth, along with almost everyone else’s, has shrunk. Instead, elementary school students in this well-off village in Westchester County are taking part in a campaign called Chores Mean More to raise at least $2,800 for storybooks and writing supplies for the Red Rose School in Kibera, a disease-wracked slum in Nairobi, Kenya.
“I really want people who don’t have the stuff we do to know that they can be lucky too,” said Lily Brown, 7, a second grader at the Bronxville School who has earned $10 baby-sitting, taking out the trash and washing dishes. It helps that her mom pays her a premium of $1 a chore.
The money will support a literacy program called LitWorld, which has connected students in affluent Westchester suburbs with impoverished schools in Nairobi and Monrovia, Liberia, to promote reading and writing. Since October, the Bronxville students have exchanged e-mail messages with Red Rose students and created online books to illustrate their school life, and now, their chores at home. Red Rose students have sent their own books as well as letters handwritten in pencil.
In nearby Ardsley, Concord Road Elementary School raised more than $6,000 for the Red Rose School through a used book sale last year, and sent disposable cameras for Red Rose students to document their community for the Ardsley students.
Seventh graders at Woodlands Community Temple in Greenburgh wrote rhymes to help African students learn to read and wrote stories inspired by Jewish prayers to share their faith. Emma Solomon, 13, a student at Farragut Middle School in Hastings-on-Hudson, set up a laptop at her bat mitzvah last month for guests to tell their own stories, and created table centerpieces from markers, pencils, crayons, chalk and scissors that will be donated to the African schools. “Stories can be written by anyone, no matter your race, religion, gender, wealth or where in the world you live,” Emma said.
LitWorld was started last year by Pam Allyn, a literacy consultant and author who previously worked for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia. Ms. Allyn, 46, said she decided to help the African schools after being contacted by their administrators, and enlisted the support of influential friends: Phoebe Yeh, editorial director of HarperCollins Children’s Books; Marva Allen, chief executive officer of Hue-Man Bookstore and Cafe in Harlem; and Joanne Heyman, executive director of the Urban Zen Foundation, which was co-founded by the fashion designer Donna Karan.
“LitWorld is about the idea that stories are transcendent,” Ms. Allyn said. “Children love to tell stories and hear stories and the next step is the written word.”
LitWorld has raised $130,000 from foundations, educators, schools and businesses, including $10,000 from Starwood Hotels and Resorts, which operates properties in Africa. On May 12, it will hold its first benefit, a cocktail reception at Lincoln Center.
Ms. Allyn has held free writing workshops for teachers in Nairobi and Monrovia and plans to return to both cities this summer. She said she has adapted some of her strategies for the African schools, such as putting more emphasis on oral story-telling because of the shortage of paper and supplies. At one elementary school in Monrovia, Ms. Allyn said, the principal carried around a locked box containing a single piece of chalk.
Rose Mureka, a fifth-grade teacher at the Red Rose School, said that teacher training, if offered at all, is extremely limited because of the expense. Her school serves poor children, many of them orphaned after their parents died of AIDS. After attending Ms. Allyn’s workshops last summer, Ms. Mureka started reading aloud with her students. “I realized how important it is to teach reading and writing because it’s the key to every other subject,” she said. “I used to take a book and give it to the kids and say: ‘You read it yourself.’ After a little training, I learned that they cannot do it on their own.”
But not everything has worked. When Ms. Mureka heard that a Bronxville teacher started class every morning by gathering students to read a story, she wanted to do the same. But there was not enough space in her classroom and her students arrive at different times because some must walk an hour or more.
Ms. Mureka said her students eagerly await the books from the Bronxville students, devouring every detail about how they live, what they eat, where they go on weekends. “The only thing they do is help their parents in their houses,” she said of her students.
In Bronxville, the elementary school is housed in a grand brick building surrounded by playing fields. Less than one percent of the 700 elementary students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced lunch. When the student council proposed the chores campaign, some students asked if they could simply donate money rather than do the chores.
But many students have opted to log hours of work, including one fourth-grade boy who has completed more than three dozen chores.
“The point of Chores Mean More is that kids don’t just ask their parents for money,” said Eric Dunn, 10, a fifth grader on the student council. Eric, who does not usually have chores, has earned $5 by raking leaves and helping his mother in the garden.
Thomas L. Wilson, the elementary school principal, said his school gets many requests to help humanitarian causes from concerned students and parents, but in this case, helping the Red Rose School turned out to be mutually beneficial. “It’s just an extraordinary thing when our kindergarten students have friends in Kenya,” he said. “I don’t think there are many students who are confused about where Kenya is now.”
In a second-grade class the other morning, students were compiling a list of the differences between life in Bronxville and Kibera, glimpsed through books and e-mail messages with the Red Rose students.
“We see squirrels and chipmunks, they see elephants.
“We get water from a faucet, they fetch it from a well, carrying it in a bucket on their heads.
“We swing from playground bars at recess, they play marbles and jump rope.”
But even more striking were the similarities: “We all love to eat candy. We all love to sing. We all love to read and write stories.”
“I want them to see they are connected to the rest of the world,” said Valerie Palacio, the teacher. “Kids are kids, no matter where they are.”
Doing a Few Chores, and Helping Bridge Bronxville and Nairobi
By WINNIE HU
BRONXVILLE, N.Y. — At 25 cents a job, or more, the children of Bronxville are laboring at home, some for the first time: cleaning their rooms, unloading the dishwasher, replacing toilet paper, pulling weeds.
It is not that they are suddenly in need of money, even if their parents’ net worth, along with almost everyone else’s, has shrunk. Instead, elementary school students in this well-off village in Westchester County are taking part in a campaign called Chores Mean More to raise at least $2,800 for storybooks and writing supplies for the Red Rose School in Kibera, a disease-wracked slum in Nairobi, Kenya.
“I really want people who don’t have the stuff we do to know that they can be lucky too,” said Lily Brown, 7, a second grader at the Bronxville School who has earned $10 baby-sitting, taking out the trash and washing dishes. It helps that her mom pays her a premium of $1 a chore.
The money will support a literacy program called LitWorld, which has connected students in affluent Westchester suburbs with impoverished schools in Nairobi and Monrovia, Liberia, to promote reading and writing. Since October, the Bronxville students have exchanged e-mail messages with Red Rose students and created online books to illustrate their school life, and now, their chores at home. Red Rose students have sent their own books as well as letters handwritten in pencil.
In nearby Ardsley, Concord Road Elementary School raised more than $6,000 for the Red Rose School through a used book sale last year, and sent disposable cameras for Red Rose students to document their community for the Ardsley students.
Seventh graders at Woodlands Community Temple in Greenburgh wrote rhymes to help African students learn to read and wrote stories inspired by Jewish prayers to share their faith. Emma Solomon, 13, a student at Farragut Middle School in Hastings-on-Hudson, set up a laptop at her bat mitzvah last month for guests to tell their own stories, and created table centerpieces from markers, pencils, crayons, chalk and scissors that will be donated to the African schools. “Stories can be written by anyone, no matter your race, religion, gender, wealth or where in the world you live,” Emma said.
LitWorld was started last year by Pam Allyn, a literacy consultant and author who previously worked for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia. Ms. Allyn, 46, said she decided to help the African schools after being contacted by their administrators, and enlisted the support of influential friends: Phoebe Yeh, editorial director of HarperCollins Children’s Books; Marva Allen, chief executive officer of Hue-Man Bookstore and Cafe in Harlem; and Joanne Heyman, executive director of the Urban Zen Foundation, which was co-founded by the fashion designer Donna Karan.
“LitWorld is about the idea that stories are transcendent,” Ms. Allyn said. “Children love to tell stories and hear stories and the next step is the written word.”
LitWorld has raised $130,000 from foundations, educators, schools and businesses, including $10,000 from Starwood Hotels and Resorts, which operates properties in Africa. On May 12, it will hold its first benefit, a cocktail reception at Lincoln Center.
Ms. Allyn has held free writing workshops for teachers in Nairobi and Monrovia and plans to return to both cities this summer. She said she has adapted some of her strategies for the African schools, such as putting more emphasis on oral story-telling because of the shortage of paper and supplies. At one elementary school in Monrovia, Ms. Allyn said, the principal carried around a locked box containing a single piece of chalk.
Rose Mureka, a fifth-grade teacher at the Red Rose School, said that teacher training, if offered at all, is extremely limited because of the expense. Her school serves poor children, many of them orphaned after their parents died of AIDS. After attending Ms. Allyn’s workshops last summer, Ms. Mureka started reading aloud with her students. “I realized how important it is to teach reading and writing because it’s the key to every other subject,” she said. “I used to take a book and give it to the kids and say: ‘You read it yourself.’ After a little training, I learned that they cannot do it on their own.”
But not everything has worked. When Ms. Mureka heard that a Bronxville teacher started class every morning by gathering students to read a story, she wanted to do the same. But there was not enough space in her classroom and her students arrive at different times because some must walk an hour or more.
Ms. Mureka said her students eagerly await the books from the Bronxville students, devouring every detail about how they live, what they eat, where they go on weekends. “The only thing they do is help their parents in their houses,” she said of her students.
In Bronxville, the elementary school is housed in a grand brick building surrounded by playing fields. Less than one percent of the 700 elementary students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced lunch. When the student council proposed the chores campaign, some students asked if they could simply donate money rather than do the chores.
But many students have opted to log hours of work, including one fourth-grade boy who has completed more than three dozen chores.
“The point of Chores Mean More is that kids don’t just ask their parents for money,” said Eric Dunn, 10, a fifth grader on the student council. Eric, who does not usually have chores, has earned $5 by raking leaves and helping his mother in the garden.
Thomas L. Wilson, the elementary school principal, said his school gets many requests to help humanitarian causes from concerned students and parents, but in this case, helping the Red Rose School turned out to be mutually beneficial. “It’s just an extraordinary thing when our kindergarten students have friends in Kenya,” he said. “I don’t think there are many students who are confused about where Kenya is now.”
In a second-grade class the other morning, students were compiling a list of the differences between life in Bronxville and Kibera, glimpsed through books and e-mail messages with the Red Rose students.
“We see squirrels and chipmunks, they see elephants.
“We get water from a faucet, they fetch it from a well, carrying it in a bucket on their heads.
“We swing from playground bars at recess, they play marbles and jump rope.”
But even more striking were the similarities: “We all love to eat candy. We all love to sing. We all love to read and write stories.”
“I want them to see they are connected to the rest of the world,” said Valerie Palacio, the teacher. “Kids are kids, no matter where they are.”
