Last Friday, the day started very differently from most at Lick-Wilmerding High School. Instead of 560 kids streaming through the front door and heading to classrooms, students, faculty and staff dispersed to locations all over the Bay Area to participate in our first ever All School Public Purpose Program Day. More than 30 teams of students and facstaff fanned out to more than 25 project sites, to clean up neighborhoods and beaches, paint buildings, restock food pantries, perform music for seniors, restore natural habitats, and more. 

Organized by the team from the Center for Civic Engagement and especially Ravi Lau (1992), the Director of the Public Purpose Program, the effort embodies the school’s mission of being a private school with a public purpose and giving students opportunities to engage meaningfully with their communities. Here are just a few of the projects:

• Led by 11th grader Ilana Zimmerman, who started the Adaptive Tech Club at LWHS, a group of about 20 students gathered in the Electronics Shop to transform toys and make them more accessible to children with special needs. Students put their technical skills to work rewiring dolls, toy airplanes, and other electronic games with new, more accessible buttons. Thanks to Ilana’s partnership with the Oakland Unified School District, the 40+ toys transformed that day will go directly to children in Oakland public schools. Ilana described the importance of the project: “If kids are able to learn how to use these buttons to play with toys – something that’s fun and motivating – then they can later use them for communication or to control a wheelchair. To learn, you kind of need to be able to interact a bit, and these [adapted toys] totally help these kids interact.”
   
• While members of the Adaptive Tech Club were working with soldering irons and screwdrivers, students from Anton Krukowski's Psychology PPP Class arrived at the Florence Fang Community Farm in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood. Armed with paintbrushes and some very bright yellow paint, they set to work painting the stage and surrounding structures, assisted by LWHS librarian Danielle Farinacci. From there, they moved on to weeding around the entrance and the fountain, helping to beautify and maintain the space. LWHS enjoys a long-standing and productive relationship with the Florence Fang garden; our students always enjoy spending time in this peaceful oasis, among the chickens and rows of vegetables.
   
• Meanwhile, Instrumental Music Teacher Jason Gillenwater, Dean Chris Yin, and 26 students from LWHS’ Chamber Orchestra and Advanced Jazz & Contemporary Music classes went on tour! Their project for the day was to perform at local recreation centers in the city. Their first stop was the OMI Senior Center, where they filled the room with melodies and brought smiles and toe-tapping to the seniors. Afterward, they headed to the Pomeroy Recreation Center, where they dazzled the audience. Mr. Gillenwater captured the day perfectly: “It was a very rewarding experience having our students play for two incredibly appreciative and diverse audiences. Watching the faces of the community at OMI and Pomeroy light up was a great reminder of the joy live music brings and the talents of our students.”
   
• The day also featured outdoor projects, including an Ocean Beach clean up, neighborhood trash pick-ups, and habitat restoration projects like the one at the Coyote Point Recreation Area in San Mateo. At Coyote Point, the LWHS team rooted out invasive fennel in order to give the local native plants room to thrive. This simple work had a huge impact: community partner Stuart Smith, of San Mateo County Parks, told the students: “With 30 of you here today digging up fennel, you did over 100 hours of work, which would have taken me three weeks.” It was gratifying to the students to provide such a valuable service to this San Mateo resource.

We are immensely grateful to our community partners for opening their doors (and farms, and fields, and greenways) to us. LWHS’ Public Purpose Program Day not only provided hundreds of hours of service in the community but also helped instill in our students a deep sense of the power of collective action and the difference they can make in the world. See a slideshow of the day here!