Day of Service Connects Students With Community Partners Across New York

Friends Seminary students spread out across New York City and the surrounding boroughs this spring for Day of Service, working with community partners in parks, gardens, food access organizations, historic sites, older adult centers, and environmental stewardship programs.

Lower and Middle School students participated on May 6, while Upper School students began the work earlier this spring on April 30. Across divisions, the day connected service with curriculum, reflection, and Quaker practice, giving students a chance to learn from community partners while contributing to work already underway across the city.

For the Lower School, the day marked an important milestone: the first time Lower School Day of Service moved off campus. The experience was part of a developing Lower School Community Engagement Framework, designed to make service more intentional, age-appropriate, and connected to the curriculum. In the weeks leading up to May 6, students took part in lessons that introduced the Quaker themes guiding their grade-level work while also helping them learn about the community partners they would visit.

Those themes were not abstract. They were built into classroom conversations, read-alouds, projects, and reflection. Students considered what it means to be part of a community, how people care for one another, what stewardship looks like in a city, and how advocacy begins with noticing needs close to home.

Kindergarten students focused on community through their work with God’s Love We Deliver. In preparation for and during their visit, students learned about volunteerism and the organization’s work supporting New Yorkers living with serious illness. Their service included a hands-on crafting activity connected to gratitude for volunteers, helping even the youngest students see that care can be expressed through small, thoughtful acts.

Grade 1 students explored stewardship through the lens of neighborhood and city parks, partnering with the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association. Their work asked them to notice the shared spaces around them and consider how caring for a park is also a way of caring for the people who use it.

Grade 2 students focused on integrity, relationship-building, and the question, “Who is in our community?” Students visited older adult centers through New York Foundation for Senior Citizens, connecting their learning to the importance of presence, respect, and intergenerational care.

Grade 3 students worked with Earth Matter, connecting equality, sustainability, and stewardship through hands-on environmental learning. Their work also created a meaningful point of connection with Grade 8, who partnered with Earth Matter as well. Across divisions, students engaged with questions about waste, soil, food systems, and responsibility to the earth—different developmental entry points into the same larger work.

Grade 4 students examined stewardship, activism, and advocacy through the history of civic engagement in New York City. Their work with Friends Place and the Museum of the City of New York helped students think about how people have used their voices, choices, and collective action to make change in their communities.

In the Middle School, students carried this work into broader civic, historical, and environmental contexts.

Grade 5 students traveled to Flushing Meeting and Bowne House, grounding their Day of Service in simplicity, Quaker history, and reflection. Their schedule included service projects, a tour, lunch together, Meeting for Worship, and closing reflections.

Grade 6 students partnered with RISE for a beach cleanup, connecting stewardship to the shoreline and the city’s coastal ecosystems. After their service, students gathered for a brief Meeting for Worship on the beach, bringing silence and reflection into the work itself.

Grade 7 students visited the Quaker Cemetery, where equality served as the guiding theme. Through volunteer work, a tour, Meeting for Worship, and time together outdoors, students considered history, memory, and the responsibility of caring for shared places.

Grade 8 students traveled to Governors Island to volunteer with Earth Matter. Their day included travel by subway and ferry, advisory-based activities, Meeting for Worship, and hands-on service with the Earth Matter team. As the oldest Middle School students, they brought a growing sense of independence and responsibility to the day.

In the Upper School, students worked with community partners across New York City, taking part in projects connected to food access, environmental stewardship, care for public spaces, and community support.

Grade 9 students volunteered with City Harvest and Rethink Food, connecting their Day of Service work to food access, sustainability, and care for New Yorkers facing food insecurity. Through these partnerships, students supported organizations that recover, prepare, and distribute food across the city, while considering the systems and relationships that help communities care for one another. 

Grade 10 students volunteered with Riverside Park Conservancy, contributing to the care and stewardship of one of the city’s major public parks. Their work asked students to consider how shared green spaces are sustained, and how caring for the city’s parks is also a form of service to the wider community.

Grade 11 students worked with Earth Matter, taking part in hands-on composting and stewardship work connected to sustainability and care for the earth. Together, they bagged 1,124 pounds of compost, weeded the lavender field, sifted compost from the farm in preparation for Earth Matter’s move to a new site, removed contaminants from compost piles, and decorated and filled sample bags of compost to bring home.

Grade 12 students volunteered with several community partners across the city. Some students worked with West Side Campaign Against Hunger, supporting an organization focused on food access and dignity for New Yorkers. Others volunteered with Broadway Community, which provides meals, clothing, showers, shelter, and other forms of care to neighbors experiencing hunger, homelessness, and poverty. The visit was facilitated with support from Friends parent Bryan Mealer, Director of Social and Spiritual Support at the organization. Additional Grade 12 groups worked with God’s Love We Deliver in Manhattan and Brooklyn, supporting the organization’s work preparing and delivering medically tailored meals to people living with serious illness.

And seniors in Stefan Stawnychy’s History of the Adirondacks class volunteered at a local boathouse through a partnership arranged with longtime substitute teacher and former Upper School History Chair Lorne Swarthout. Students received an introduction to boat building, the kinds of work supported by the boathouse, and the history of the site itself. They then took part in basic cleanup and organizing, including sanding, painting, dusting, and arranging life vests. At the end of the service portion, students helped launch a full-size rowboat so the team could test a recently completed patch job.

Across all divisions, Day of Service asked students to practice what they learn every day at Friends: to listen carefully, act with integrity, notice the needs of others, and understand themselves as part of a wider community. The day also reflected the way Quaker values are woven into the curriculum—not only named in classrooms, but practiced through relationships, city partnerships, reflection, and action.

From Kindergarten students learning about gratitude and volunteerism to Upper School students working with food access and environmental partners across the city, the day offered students a simple but lasting lesson: service begins with attention. It begins by noticing who and what is around us, asking what care requires, and taking part in the steady work of building a more just and connected world.