GLOBAL LEADERS
SU P P LY I NG HOPE INSHA and SHEZA MERCHANT send used school supplies around the globe.
EACH YEAR, Pace Academy’s Cara Isdell Service Award recognizes an Upper School
student for his or her commitment to making the world a better place. Recipients receive a monetary prize, half of which is to be donated to the service organization of the winner’s choice. When sophomore INSHA MERCHANT received the 2017 Cara Isdell Service Award, she knew immediately where she would send the entirety of the funds. “I have visited Karachi, Pakistan, several times in the past few years, and I met students who are academically motivated to succeed but have very few resources,” Insha says. Her most recent visit to the country, in partnership with Global Encounters, an international youth service camp, included the opportunity to develop an English-language curriculum for primary school students. Using her prize money, Insha funded the purchase of more than 20 computers, which have been set up at two schools in the remote city of Hunza in Northern Pakistan, and at three computer-training centers in impoverished areas of Karachi. “The computer labs will teach basic computer literacy to individuals of all ages and provide professional-development training to adults,” she says. Insha’s gift directly aligns with the work she and her sister, seventh-grader SHEZA MERCHANT, have carried out through Supplying Hope Around the Globe, an organization they founded three years ago. As a result of annual school-supply drives in the Pace Lower and Middle Schools, and a used-book drive added last year, the sisters have collected more than 2,100 pounds of pencils, erasers, markers and other materi-
als. The supplies, once organized and sorted into gallon bags for individual students, are
distributed around the world. “We began by donating school supplies to organizations in Atlanta and internationally through friends and family,” Sheza recalls, “but a couple years ago, I went to Costa Rica on the fifth-grade Isdell Center for Global Leadership (ICGL) trip. Leading up to the trip, we learned about the Chilamate Elementary School, which we would be visiting, providing us the opportunity to donate items to help the kids at the school. We realized that through Pace ICGL trips, we could easily get the supplies we collected around the world.” Since then, Supplying Hope Around the Globe has provided school supplies to children on five continents: North America, South America, Asia, Africa and Europe. This past year alone, Pace students delivered Supplying Hope packets to Costa Rica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Ireland. “It’s really exciting to see these supplies get a new life instead of being thrown away and ending up in a landfill,” the sisters say. “It helps our planet and people in need.” For their efforts, Insha and Sheza received the 2017 President’s Volunteer Service Award at the Gold level, which recognizes more than 100 hours of community service in a given year. But they’re not done yet. “This spring, we plan to expand our book drive to the Upper School so that the seniors can empty their bookshelves before going to college,” Insha says. “The goal is that by the time I graduate, we will have collected 3,500 pounds of school supplies and books. We hope that by the time Sheza graduates that number will be 5,000.”
KnightTimes | Winter 2018
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