Lending a Helping Hand

Thacher's first-annual Community Service Day
It's hard to miss the call to community service at Thacher. You can hear it in The Banquet Song, still sung at important School meals, exhorting us to "do the best work in the world that we can." You can read it in the mission of the School, which aspires to prepare students to live for "their own greatest good and for the greatest good of their fellow citizens."

Yet, in the midst of a routine as jam packed with academics and sports and riding and performances and campus jobs (you get the idea) as life at Thacher is, we may be tempted to postpone serving others until after we've handled the due dates and obligations right in front of us. Which isn't to say that we don't make time for community service. Every week students tutor in local schools, visit the elderly at local rest homes, repair trails in the Los Padres National Forest, and find other ways to serve the Ojai community. Yet, most of us appreciate an additional prompt.

Recently, that invitation was extended by Molly Perry, head of Thacher's Community Service Program, who, along with her senior leaders, Nu Xiong '13, Gracie Farese '13, and Jin Ah Jung '13, took things to the next level by creating a day dedicated to serving those in need and bettering our community.

Enter the first-annual Thacher Community Service Day, which offered many different opportunities for the students to help within our own community and the larger area around our campus, including: a beach clean-up, trail work, gardening, dumpster diving (for a campus waste stream census), bleacher painting, Habitat for Humanity, volunteering at the homeless shelter, Special Olympics, Food Forward, posting new PTS trail signs, and many more.

Ms. Perry reflected on this experience in recent post on her faculty blog.

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Notice of nondiscriminatory policy as to students: The Thacher School admits students of any race, color, national, and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the School. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national, and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admission policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other School-administered programs.