ETHS Leadership Students Help With After School Program at Nichols

By Daisy Chaudruc, Evanston Township High School sophomore

Evanston Township High School offers a leadership development program run by Mary Collins, called Emerge. Ms. Collins is the community service director and runs Emerge on the side.

For those of us who applied to Emerge in May of our freshmen year and got accepted, our first activity of the club was to go on a field trip to the rotary building and meet several presidents of organizations around Evanston and discuss problems in the community and solutions We also met with ETHS staff and discussed problems in our school. After that we were to pick out our top three topics that interested us. 

I was put in a group who was tasked to take on “poverty in the Evanston community.” My other group mates are Judith Roeder, Joe Bertsche, and Kathryn Halverson. After brainstorming and getting shot down by a couple of organizations we ended up working with Y.O.U. Derek Mahan connected us with Alishia Pointer and Megan Wall-Orleans, who manage the Y.O.U. after school program at Nichols Middle School, spending an hour teaching life enrichment skills.

We lucked out when the topic they were teaching was poverty. We collaborated and helped facilitate the curriculum as well as make a PowerPoint to share and a video from some of the sessions. The students were a group of about 10 7th graders who were a part of the after school program at Nichols. We used online simulations that made the students choose what they’d want to do with their very limited money to simulate being in poverty (for example, a question asked, “your mother is sick do you want to pay $400 for her medicine?”).

Then the students researched organizations, made flyers, and decided they were going to do a bake sale after school a couple of days and a clothing drive. In total they raised more than $100 for family focus in Evanston and received several garbage bags full of clothes to donate to escca. It was amazing to be able to see them progress during each lesson and the understanding they had at the end will follow them the rest of their lives. Being able to integrate high schoolers creates a role model closer to their ages and will hopefully influence them to do emerge in high school.

Next year we will be starting a mentoring program with the Y.O.U. organization at Nichols. Alishia and Megan were amazing to work with and always open to ideas or questions we had.

Photo: Some of the 7th graders in the Y.O.U. program doing a simulation of poverty game.