It's Back to School with Brooms and Mops

BOSTON - Aug. 19, 2015 - PRLog -- If you think an ordinary household mop can’t transform a community, it might be time to think again. On Thursday, Aug. 27, 2015, parents and staff of Dorchester’s McCormack Middle School will be joined by volunteers from Trinity Church Copley Square and its youth-development focused nonprofit Trinity Boston Foundation, as well as by others from the community, to clean and beautify the school. Why? To ensure that students enrolled at one of Boston’s most underserved public schools are greeted this September with freshly washed windows, clean corridors and sanitized restrooms stocked with such basics as soap and paper towels – to say nothing of privacy doors separating toilet stalls.

“It’s about cleaning and repairing, but it’s also about so much more,” said Adina Davidson, Trinity Boston Foundation clinical manager and one of the clean-up project’s coordinators. “It’s about making all youth feel supported and valued and important. It’s about human dignity and social justice. And, it’s about working together in community.”

For the past three years, Trinity Boston Foundation’s clinical staff have been embedded as mental health and developmental professionals at the McCormack Middle School, part of a school complex known as “the DMC” – the Dever-McCormack School. For the past two years, Trinity Church parishioners have volunteered at the adjoining Dever Elementary School, where they have worked as classroom aides, literacy tutors and book fair sponsors as well as organizers of school-wide special events and celebrations. For the first time this year, Trinity Boston Foundation staff members and Trinity Church staff and parishioners are also helping to tackle the clean-up job at McCormack Middle School.

“Trinity is about building up and empowering community, whatever that takes and whatever that looks like,” said the Rev. Rainey Dankel, Trinity Church’s Associate Rector for Community Outreach and Ministry Development, and other co-organizer of the clean-up project. “Trinity’s community engagement model is based on collaboration and mutual interaction. The more we work together in this way, the more all of us are transformed.”

McCormack Middle School’s eighth-grade Civics teacher Neema Avashia agrees that transformation is definitely the desired result.  According to Avashia, teachers and other staff members at the school do all they can to keep their individual classrooms clean and in working order. The larger problem is priorities, and how those play out in the public sphere.

“With tighter resources across the board for our public schools, and less staff to do the work, facility maintenance takes a hit,” Avashia said. “It’s understandable that the available resources need to go into academics, but when kids see their school’s public spaces deteriorating, they get the message that the public sphere doesn’t care about them. Hence, why should they care?”

Avashia calls the clean-up day at the school a ‘Fresh Start’ for the entire community – students and parents as well as teachers and staff. She has plans to spearhead a monthly service day during the school year, enlisting the participation of McCormack Middle School students themselves. “I’m hoping to help build a shared sense of community and responsibility for our space,” she said. “I’d love to be able to start that work by sharing with the kids what has been done over the summer to prepare the space for them.”

Trinity Church in the City of Boston, a thriving 283-year-old Episcopal parish located in historic Copley Square,has long been recognized as an urban crossroads for contemplation, culture and conversation. Seven days a week, Trinity is open and welcoming to all to participate in worship, music, education and community service. Trinity Boston Foundation, a separately incorporated  501(c)3 subsidiary of the Church since 2007, serves more than 500 Boston youth each year through a variety of programs that encourage health and wellness, educational achievement and character and leadership development. Trinity Boston Foundation honors, respects and serves individuals of all faith traditions, including those with no faith tradition.

For more information about Trinity Boston Foundation, visit http://www.trinityinspires.org.