Features
Wonder, Care, Act: Elevating Service at Falk
At Falk, our students, teachers, and families are constantly seeking opportunities to serve the community around them. It’ s a natural consequence of the school’ s Wonder, Care, Act philosophy, which emphasizes curiosity and compassion, both within the school walls and beyond.
At the start of the 2024 – 25 school year, Director Jill Sarada highlighted this shared compassion and invited the community to continue elevating service in their lives. Answering her call, students and teachers identified new ways to connect classroom and extracurricular activities to service while also continuing beloved traditions like assembling care kits. The school also held its first-ever Day of Service and hopes to continue the tradition for years to come.
Fighting Food Insecurity
During the 2024 holiday season, LGBTQIA + and Activism Club organized a three-week donation drive to collect shelf-stable food and toys for local families. By the end of December, they had several boxes to donate to the Foster Love Project, a nonprofit organization that supports foster children and families in the Pittsburgh area.
In January, art teacher Deborah Lieberman invited faculty and staff to make ceramic bowls to donate to a Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank fundraiser dinner. The event supported Empty Bowls, an international project to fight hunger through art.
Later in the school year, third graders had a food insecurity unit, during which they learned about the thousands of Pittsburgh residents who sometimes must choose between paying their bills and buying groceries. Afterward, they launched their annual Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank fundraiser, collecting over $ 5,500 in donations by the end of June.
Care Kits
Each year, Primary students spend a day making affirming notes and drawings and packing them into care kits alongside food and hygiene items donated by the community. Throughout the 2024 – 25 school year, finished kits were available in the Falk lobby for families, faculty, and staff to take home and share with neighbors in need.
Making Falk a Better Place
In addition to serving the greater Pittsburgh area, Middle School students turned their focus toward their own Falk community. Working in small groups, they started by observing the world around them and identifying areas for improvement— the first step in the Wonder, Care, Act framework. Then, caring about these issues and the people they were impacting, they brainstormed sustainable solutions and brought them to life during Falk Woods class.
In talking to faculty, one group discovered that Primary students had nowhere to set down their lunchboxes while they sorted compost, trash, and recycling at the end of lunch. This gap resulted in a chaotic back-and-forth between the tables and trash cans while students disposed of and gathered their belongings. To streamline the process, eighth graders used recycled materials from the WonderLab to build benches for the clean-up station, making for a more efficient lunchtime dismissal.
Another set of projects was born from the trash buildup on the Falk Woods hillside. After consistently noticing litter behind the fraternity complex, a group of sixth graders decided to post signs in the area and send letters to their college-aged neighbors encouraging them to be mindful of the environment.
Other projects include creating butterfly and bird houses, removing invasive grasses from the hillside, working on the fairy garden enclosure, and building Falk Woods gates out of a recycled wood palette. Lori Wertz, Falk Woods instructor, says her students are aware that their work here will continue to have an effect after they leave, and they want that legacy to be a positive one.
EN AVANT | 2025 ISSUE