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Christian Service
BRINGING LIGHT TO A DARK WORLD THROUGH CHRISTIAN SERVICE
What good is spiritual growth, if you don’t put it into action?
At Notre Dame Prep, our students, under the guidance of Ms. Shelley Dinges, our director of Christian Service Learning, are given opportunities to help with many causes and charitable organizations in our community and the world.
We have a robust Christian Service Learning program because we believe philanthropy is a learned behavior. We immerse our students in an environment where they care for our neighbors starting with the Freshman Plunge and it carries through to their senior year and beyond. Volunteering at least 120 hours over four years is a graduation requirement, although most NDP students log many more hours than are required.
In the face of the novel coronavirus outbreak, we had to adjust the ways in which service hours were earned.
Students were allowed to do service at home in the form of chores, projects or giving blood on their own. The school hosted two massive food drives during the quarantine period benefitting St. Mary’s Food Bank and Aris Foundation.
Hundreds of school families and neighbors drove through the parking lot at Notre Dame Prep for the May The 4th Be You: Serving our Community, Celebrating our Faith event. They brought enough food to fill a minibus with peanut butter sandwiches, lunches, decorated sacks, dog food, drinks and toiletries for Aris Foundation.
“The people at Aris Foundation were astounded by the amount of donations we delivered to them,” Dinges said. “It took us two hours just to unload the bus.”
It was a similar situation for St. Mary’s Food Bank, filling two vans from top to bottom. Notre Dame Prep collected 3,567 pounds of food, $200 in gift cards and $125 in cash. “This was the biggest delivery by weight from a single organization that they have received since the COVID-19 outbreak,” said Matt Rylski, director of enrollment at Notre Dame Prep.
Our student body defied the obstacles and logged 31,662 combined hours of Christian Service during the 2019-20 school year. In addition, they raised more than $15,661 for various charities through $5 jeans days and taking in cash donations at our food and diaper drives.
