By Dylan Howlett
“Can I tell you a story?” Kim Shaw asks. It is the penultimate night of Hanukkah — 12 days before Christmas, 13 before Kwanzaa — as she stands outside of her executive director’s office at the Triangle Nonprofit & Volunteer Leadership Center. The center has, for more than 45 years, worked with Durham County Social Services to organize Share Your Holiday, which provides new gifts to families. Of those 45 years, there is one, Shaw says, that always remains with her. “It’s one of my favorite stories,” she says. It is about Durham Academy.
About six years ago, the Upper School at DA continued its tradition of having advisories sponsor one family each as part of Share Your Holiday. A single mother submitted requests for gifts. They were all for her kids. That was the point, she said. They were the priority. But someone at DA thought to ask the woman about herself. “Well, what about you? Do YOU need anything?” No, no, the woman said. Just the gifts for my kids. And then she let slip a morsel of a dream. Her family didn’t have a dining table, not even a kitchen table, where they could eat their meals together. That would be nice, she said. One day.
Her delivery time arrived. Shaw was at the woman’s home when a group dropped off the requested gifts for her children. The woman smiled, broadly. And then she saw the rest of the group unloading something else, something bigger. Dining room chairs. A dining room table. The woman started to cry. “It’s hard for me to tell this story,” Shaw said Wednesday, “without getting choked up.”
It is one of many gratitude-laden stories that have unfolded for more than 35 years of Share Your Holiday at the Upper School. On Friday, students enjoyed an extended advisory during which they wrapped toys, clothes, household items and other necessities. The Bohanek advisory sprawled across its classroom floor and littered a table with paper and ribbons and tape; all the while, James Bohanek, the Upper School theatre teacher and fine arts academic leader, pushed his 11th-graders with the ebullient urgency of a charitable taskmaster. They debated the right bows, salvaged paper scraps for the purposes of fashioning gift tags, carved heart-shaped notes out of construction paper. The centerpiece gift was a sweater. It was impossible within that space, with Bohanek and his students, to feel anything but the warmth and comfort that comes with being seen.
On Tuesday, Upper School teachers William Edwards and Mike Meyer dropped off gifts for 46 sponsored families at Yates Baptist Church in Durham. More than a half-dozen volunteers from the DA community were at the church’s distribution center Wednesday to help collect additional gifts, including those wrapped by the DA Parent/Caregiver Christian Affinity Group, which sponsored two families and 14 people. “If there is one thing I have learned as a parent,” Upper School Director Lanis Wilson said in an email Sunday to students and staff, “it’s that the giving part feels even better than the receiving part this time of year.”
It is a sentiment echoed by DA’s four divisions, each of which shared a piece of its holiday — in the giving, selfless spirit that is characteristic of the school community — with someone else, as if they pulled up a chair at a table and invited a friend or loved one to sit with them.
Upper School Key Club: Food Drive for Iglesia Presbiteriana Emanuel
Isaac Zurbuch ’25 was considering how he could become more involved with clubs at DA when he turned to his family. His mom, Amy Knight, had started a chapter of the Key Club — the international, student-led organization dedicated to acts of service — at Bishop Luers High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Zurbuch’s aunt had participated in her high school’s Kiwanis Club. He felt, too, that the imposed distance of COVID-19 had attenuated some of DA’s stronger bonds with community service initiatives. Fellow 11th-graders Rina Bolognesi ’25 and Will Hunter ’25 felt the same way. “It kind of inspired me to do something,” Zurbuch said. And so he started an Upper School Key Club.
“Bringing it back was really nice to kind of instill that idea in the whole school that it’s important to help your community,” said Bolognesi, who leads the club alongside Hunter and Zurbuch.
“The goal is bigger than the Key Club itself,” Hunter said. “Ideally, the Key Club will be here after we’ve graduated. It reminds people that volunteering is a thing, and we’re hoping to make it more the norm.”
They started by developing connections with Urban Ministries of Durham and the Museum of Life and Science. When they decided to organize a food drive as their primary initiative for the holiday season, they consulted with Kelly Teagarden, the Upper School community engagement coordinator. Zurbuch, Bolognesi and Hunter originally had no intentions of expanding the food drive beyond the Upper School. But Teagarden suggested they involve the other divisions, which — to little surprise — responded with enthusiastic donations and participation.
The Key Club leaders sent weekly emails to families and distributed flyers in the Friday Folders of Preschool and Lower School students. Zurbuch and Hunter also presented at a Middle School community meeting to an audience of students and teachers, including Spanish teacher Stephanie Rudolph. “Everyone was excited to get involved,” Rudolph said. She decided that all of the school’s Spanish classes would make cards for families who collected the donated food, just as her eighth-grade students had done last year.
The beneficiary of the food drive, Iglesia Presbiteriana Emanuel, is no stranger to DA. The Middle School has cultivated a meaningful partnership with the church, which opened a food pantry in 2020 that serves 600 families — or about 3,500 people — every week. Multiple groups of DA seventh- and eighth-graders have volunteered at the church, including organizing a drive in 2022 — the same year in which two seventh-grade science classes partnered with the church to help the pantry answer a design question. (How can we encourage our clients to cook and eat the nutritious items in their box, even if they are unfamiliar with the item?) “I think the biggest part is just seeing there’s a broader world and actually challenging students with real-life things,” said Ben Michelman, an eighth-grade team leader and the Middle School’s community engagement coordinator.
There was no shortage of familiarity Monday when Margaret Rubiera, who helps run the leadership team behind community service at Iglesia Emanuel, received the DA Key Club’s food drive donations. A video appeal from Zurbuch, Bolognesi and Hunter that appeared on DA’s social media platforms cajoled a last-minute surge in donations, which piled high atop a pallet that sat outside of the church’s food pantry. Rubiera and Zurbuch leafed through the colorful cards provided by Rudolph’s Spanish students. “If you go to one of the food drives and see the work they’re doing, it’s some of the most wonderful people,” said Hunter, who has volunteered at the food pantry in each of the last two summers and volunteers during the school year when his schedule allows. “You see the people they’re serving need it, and a lot of times, they don’t have enough food for everybody.
“This isn’t just something we’re doing to put on our résumé. People actually need this.”
It isn’t lost on Rubiera, who smiled as she spoke with Zurbuch, Bolognesi and Hunter in the pantry’s foyer. She has been grateful, she said, for widespread support from the Durham community, including DA Middle School — and, now, the Upper School Key Club. “It shows you how much humanity — and how much good — is in a community,” Rubiera said.
Evergreen Experiences: A Soldier’s Hands
Susan Easterling ’00 saw a need, and so she filled it. She had never doubted the generous, community-oriented spirit of DA. She had felt it first as a student, and she has experienced it as the mother of a DA fourth-grader and sixth-grader. But it wasn’t enough. The logistics of family participation in service opportunities were too steep and inaccessible, and too little of the service, she felt, extended to the Durham community.
In the spring of 2023, Easterling — in conjunction with the DA Family Association — started Evergreen Experiences. Its mission is simple: Provide fun, engaging service opportunities with easy online signups. The committee has descended upon Sandy Creek Trail to pick up trash and clear debris; participated in book sorts on behalf of Book Harvest; packed rice at Urban Ministries of Durham; and assisted with the distribution and collection of Share Your Holiday gifts at Yates Baptist Church. “We are thrilled about the volunteer service opportunities our families can engage in that not only builds a sense of belonging, but also positively impacts community organizations,” said Asha Patel, the president of the DA Family Association.
As Easterling develops a robust volunteering calendar, she has already found a signature event for the spring semester: a Feb. 24 community care packaging event on behalf of A Soldier’s Hands. The idea traces back to an Instagram post that appeared in Easterling’s feed and included pictures of care packages for soldiers. Her son, Owen, was in fifth grade and passionate about history. Easterling reached out to Trish Shallenberger, the founder of A Soldier’s Hands who was an English student of longtime DA teacher Jordan Adair in Williamsburg, Virginia, at the start of Adair’s education career. Shallenberger, who has previously visited DA, started the organization to send care packages to every single member of a military unit — a pledge so steadfast that she will not ship any packages until she can guarantee a gift for every last member of the unit.
Easterling organized a July packaging event for Owen and his classmates at BB’s Crispy Chicken. “The kids had a great time, and they were able to make a memory of something — and play afterwards,” Easterling said. “It’s another part of my vision: to bring community together, and have it be fun.”
The summertime event compelled Easterling to make Soldier’s Hands a schoolwide event, which Shallenberger will attend in February. It is just the beginning, Easterling hopes, of a lasting — or evergreen — commitment to community outreach.
“This is something that’s twofold: It’s not only helping the outside community, which is one of my personal goals, but it’s also helping your inside community because people get to do this together, and you can build relationships through that,” Easterling said. “I think a lot of people in the community do care about that, and I think it’s an avenue to do that.”
Second Grade Book Drive: Animal Protection Society of Durham
The gift of literacy is never far from the fingertips of second grade, which has annually donated about 80 books to a local organization of its choosing as part of its annual holiday service project. For this year’s book drive, however, second-grade teacher Ashley Hinton had an idea: Why not align the book drive with the prevailing interests and passions of the average second-grader? Why not, Hinton said, make the book drive about animals?
It started during this year’s Unity Day, the Preschool and Lower School’s annual celebration of an inclusive community that doubles as the kickoff for yearly service projects. Second-graders made treats and toys for animals, as well as posters for adopting animals at the Animal Protection Society of Durham. An APS staff member also gave a presentation that allowed second-graders to place the animal shelter in its community-based role. What is an animal shelter? What do we do? How can you help?
Literacy rates among animals are, as the leading science suggests, negligible. But books have an indispensable place within the adoption process. The APS runs a volunteer-based “Reading Time with Cats” program that socializes cats and kittens and helps the animals acclimate to the particular energy of younger kids. The benefits, Hinton said, also extend to kids, who can practice reading aloud to a non-judgmental, lower-stakes audience — with, they would hope, claws firmly retracted.
Every used or lightly used book that a second-grader donates this December will go to the “Reading Time with Cats” program, while Book Harvest will receive all new books that second-graders donate. On Friday, second-graders will make new bookmarks — an activity that Hinton has branded, naturally, as the Bow-Wow Meow Bash — that contain a QR code with a link to adoptable animals and the phrase “Find Your New Best Friend Today!” Students will illustrate the bookmarks with cats or dogs, and they will stick the bookmarks in each of the donated books at Book Harvest to heighten awareness for APS.
The public deserves to know, of course, that kittens love to read, too.
Kindergarten & Fourth-Grade Buddies: Emerald Pond Decorations
As a cold winter’s sun filters through the blinds of the Preschool Great Room, the Koalas — Elizabeth Parry ’13 and Allison Schenck’s kindergarten class — sit expectantly on the floor, while Chip Lupa’s fourth-grade class remains seated along the side wall. Today serves as a monthly meeting of the Fourth-Grade Buddies program, which pairs each kindergarten class with a fourth-grade counterpart. The senior members of the Lower School have gathered with the senior members of the Preschool in service of a beloved group of seniors: residents of the Emerald Pond retirement community, which will soon receive an influx of paper wreaths from their friends at DA.
Schenck, the Koalas’ unofficial executive director of crafts, motions to her feet. Paper plates with the centers cut out — resembling the shape of a donut — dot the floor as kindergartners huddle with their fourth-grade buddies. Schenck grabs a wreath mold and uses a glue stick to attach a foldout of green construction paper. The foldouts will soon fan across the perimeter of the white-plated mold to create a wreath. “Kindergartners, I want you to help your fourth-grade buddies with this,” Schenck says. “Don’t let them do it all by themselves.”
The Great Room fills with the focused, excited chatter that only a holiday-themed craft can inspire. Students reach for felt pom-poms — which, in this case, are moonlighting as berries — to accent their wreaths. The Koalas look to some of their buddies as if they are in the company of celebrities, while the fourth-graders chat amiably about school and video games and their own holiday celebrations.
Early finishers don’t need to be reminded that they’re still in school: They spring from their seated positions and retrieve a book to read with their buddy. The remaining pairs attach their last pom-poms and seal their remaining branches of construction paper with a final wave of a glue stick. It is time to go, and the fourth-graders share high-fives and farewells as Schenck surveys the completed wreaths in the middle of the floor.
“I think,” she says, “our friends at Emerald Pond are going to be happy with these.”