Ten community organizations, one hundred gourmet sandwiches, twelve-dozen cookies, sixteen pillowcases, three hundred volunteer hours, and one caring community. That is what it takes for Shipley students to make a difference in the lives of hundreds of people on the Martin Luther King Day of Service.

On Monday, January 21, over 200 Shipley students, parents, and faculty members turned their day off from school into a day on for service to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In Lower School, students assembled supply kits for Family Support Services and Cradles to Crayons. They sorted uniforms that had been donated. They made cards for sick children in area hospitals and for soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. And they assembled over one hundred meals for the homeless people served by the Broad Street Ministry in Philadelphia.

Upper School and Middle School volunteers baked over 12 dozen cookies for Ronald McDonald House. They played games with the elderly at the Wayne Senior Center. They packed and sorted donated items at four sites off campus. They sewed cheerful-looking pillowcases for children with cancer. “I had such a meaningful day,” said Upper School Service Learning Coordinator Maria Stroup, who took a small group of students to help spruce up a recently displaced family’s temporary home.

Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy is in the Civil Rights Movement, but he preached about the power of love and devoted his life to practicing “creative altruism.” Addressing a crowd in Montgomery, Alabama in 1957, he said, “An individual has not started living fully until he can rise above the narrow confines of individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity... Every person must decide, at some point, whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

King’s “creative altruism” translates into Shipley’s mission to inspire a compassionate participation in the world on the part our students. Though the MLK Day of Service is just one day, King’s spirit is felt all year long at Shipley.

View photos from Shipley's MLK Day of Service.