It's a warm morning in September and over a hundred upper schoolers, 15 faculty members, and a small but mighty group of middle schoolers gather, ready to dedicate their next four hours to service. The National Day of Service was officially designated by President Obama to make the anniversary of 9/11 a day to serve others, and Bryn Mawr works to celebrate this tradition every year with spirit, commitment, and heart. 

Leading up to the Day of Service, it was all hands on deck for CSL. We began the planning process at the end of last year: scheduling summer meeting times and crafting our site list. Then, we had four meetings throughout the summer in which we cold-emailed around 15 service sites in the hopes of curating a list of about 5-7 off-campus sites for the big day! This year, I really wanted the reps to feel in control of the Day of Service and leaned on them to reach out to sites. This was crucial to keeping everyone involved in the Day of Service process, and I could not be more proud of how hard all of our reps worked, especially our new reps who were experiencing their first CSL project! After we finalized our list of 7 off-campus sites, we had to start advertising this event to the Bryn Mawr community, finalizing planning details with the sites, and administrating travel details. This process proved to be difficult; there are so many moving pieces that go into any trip off campus, let alone 7 groups headed off to 7 different places. But, after lots of meetings and hard work in the first three weeks of school, we were finally ready for the Day of Service. 

On September 17, 2022, we sent 7 groups of upper schoolers, comprised of sports teams, the Dance Company, the musical, and lots more, to 7 off-campus sites in the Baltimore area. These sites included: Art With a Heart, Real Food Farm, Cylburn Arboretum, Baltimore Hunger Project, Strength II Love Farm, First Fruits Farm, and the Ronald McDonald House. In addition to the tradition of upper school involvement, this year we also incorporated a handful of middle schoolers into the Day of Service. This group stayed on campus with Ms. Peters, cleaning up Stony Run. I hope that this partnership continues to grow; every member of the Bryn Mawr community has something special to offer the Day of Service! All 8 of our groups served for about 2 hours doing anything from weeding to making craft projects to folding baby clothes. Every group returned to Bryn Mawr with a sense of accomplishment, some extra team bonding, and a smile on their faces! 

This day would not have been possible without our entire CSL Team: Elaina (VP), Cara (Sec-Treas), Koko (12th), Grace (12th), Charlotte (11th), Krassimira (11th), Lea (10th), Marisol (10th), Dr. Waters, Ms. Miyamoto, and Ms. Budzik!