Celebrating Community is a year-long, school-wide community service effort to commemorate our commitment to service, community and our 30th anniversary of St. Margaret’s Episcopal School. We’re challenging all members of the St. Margaret’s community to commit the 2009-2010 school year to community service, with a school-wide goal of 30,000 hours of service. Our community will reach this goal through involvement with local charitable organizations and service projects, creating new ones, or sharing what they’re already doing and encouraging others to get involved. Celebrating Community underscores our commitment to community service, which is at the heart of our mission.

This fall marks the 30th anniversary of St. Margaret’s Episcopal School. Central to the school’s mission of educating the hearts and minds of young people for lives of learning, leadership and service is a strong community and commitment to service. St. Margaret’s will mark the history of the school with the work it says is most important to its 30-year history and best signifies St. Margaret’s Episcopal School: serving the community. Through this effort, St. Margaret’s hopes to advance its longstanding commitment to service as a community, provide new and foster existing service learning experiences for its students and help those in our community.

St. Margaret’s will achieve the 30,000 hours of service goal by:

1. St. Margaret’s launched the year-long Celebrating Community initiative on Monday, Sept. 21 with a week of division-level service projects. Each school division partnered with one of four local charities, The Ark of San Juan, Father Serra’s Pantry, Project Linus and Camp Pendleton Operation Hero, to support current needs of the organization. The week culminated on Thursday, Sept. 24 when all divisions will came together to present their completed projects to the organizations and offer reflections on their work.
2. St. Margaret’s will host a variety of service projects throughout the year, however, we’re eager to see how our community embraces this challenge. We are excited to see the projects our community identify and participate in based on their own interests, as well as to see the strength of the St. Margaret’s community at work motivating new participation and service.
3. St. Margaret’s will launched this website for you to join and share your charitable work throughout the year, to share formation about service events and charitable organizations and invite other members of the community to participate. St. Margaret’s will also post information about local charities and their volunteer and donation needs as well as organize and host various service events throughout the year.

Community Service at St. Margaret’s:

The mission of the community service program at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School is to create in our students an awareness of the issues that face our local, regional and global communities, nurture a sense of compassion and responsibility, and instill the courage to take thoughtful action to improve the lives of others.

Celebrating Community is not only a one-year effort, however, a celebration of our 30-year history and continued focus on community service as an integral part of St. Margaret’s. Our ongoing commitment to service is evident in the 2008 Strategic Plan that focuses one of nine long-term goals on community outreach and service. In addition, in 2009 St. Margaret’s has appointed a school-wide Community Service Coordinator, Lora Allison, to oversee the program going forward.