ENDOWED GIVING
The IMPACT Report
In Service to Humanity One of the original founders of HKIS was a young Lutheran missionary from the Blackland prairies of Central Texas named Melvin Martin Kieschnick. He was living in Hong Kong in the 1960s and envisioned a school community defined by a few key attributes. In a conversation earlier this year, “Mel” as he is commonly known, recounted those attributes. “The school should have concern for the whole child,” said Mel, “where athletics, activities and character development augment a rigorous college-preparatory curriculum. It should be a K-12 school with an American curriculum, both of which would be firsts for Hong Kong. And it should be a school where Christian values would be a defining quality.” So Mel helped a group of business leaders and other community members to establish what would be a rather innovative school for this part of the world. Those foundational qualities still define an HKIS education.
And then there was service. HKIS should be a school where, among other important values, students learn how to ground their lives in service. Mel remembers that the mindset around service seventy years ago was different, when Hong Kong was a bustling business hub bedecked in neon. “Back then, it was an awful lot of ‘looking at it from the top down’, where the volunteer was on top of the chain and the receivers were beneath them,” Mel reflected in a conversation earlier this year. Instead, he hoped this new international school would honor the teachings of Martin Luther, resulting in 28
High School students pump water from a well on a Humanities in Action service trip to the Philippines; and in a group photo on the opposite page.
students and graduates who serve those in need because they are in need. “Lutheran theology stresses that we are saved by grace and that in response we serve others—not in hopes of rewards but simply following the example of Christ who gave His life in service to humanity.” Over the next six decades, one generation of HKIS students after another found teachers, alumni and volunteers who lived out the value of service. Among these were Zella Talbot and Marty Schmidt. Over the last thirty years, Zella supported students to create Interact, while Marty, her husband, developed the Humanities in Action courses. Alumni mention these experiences often in Alumni surveys. Both Desmond Chu ’91 and Jasmin Lau ’08, Bob Christian Alumni of the Year honorees, credit teachers like Marty and Zella with inspiring their commitment to service as adults. But a problem arose. Despite the decades-long inclusion of service opportunities in the HKIS student experience, service learning was largely a product of individual teachers and students. And without a unifying set of goals or a framework for cascading concepts, learning outcomes were inconsistent. To solve this problem of inconsistent outcomes, HKIS added a new position this year: the Service Learning Coordinator. The purpose of this role is to design, develop,