Editor’s note: Neil Sanderson is Editor-in-Chief of the New Trier News and a leader of this year’s Senior Service Project. He was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.
On Friday, Feb. 21, the latest installment of the Winter Carnival returns to the Winnetka Campus as township residents flood the halls for the classic evening of fun and fundraising. Attendees can expect a wide variety of events, activities, and food items from stands run by New Trier High School seniors. All proceeds from this year’s event will go towards the Senior Service Project’s goal of $20,000 to support veterans through Salute, Inc. and the Midwest Veterans Closet.
The carnival will serve as an anchoring event for this year’s service project, run primarily by a board of about 20 New Trier High School seniors. The decision to partner with these two organizations stemmed from last year’s Junior Day of Service, in which each junior advisery participated in a unique volunteer project to total more than 2,000 hours of service among the class, with one advisery volunteering at the Midwest Veterans Closet. The organization, which provides Illinois veterans with free food, clothing, housewares, and other basic goods, received federal grant money over the summer to expand and update their facilities.
Senior adviser chairs and coordinators of the service project Greg Sego and Kerri Simons jumped on the opportunity to build this year’s project around it while providing a valuable service to the community.
“Last year, there were still tons of different opportunities, but everybody was kind of coalesced around the one day and the one event,” Simons said. “This year, advisor rooms are engaging in so many different ways, from stuffing Halloween treat baggies to redesigning a space to going to the board meetings to present videos.”
Sego emphasized that a focus has been to encourage seniors to think of the bigger picture, taking into consideration the real impact of their work rather than merely checking off boxes.
“We always want to be mindful when engaging in service,” he said. “What we really hope our students get out of this is that the idea of serving that community and that need in our local or larger local community is more important than us just saying we did service or gave you a check.”
That mindset has been ingrained in the senior leaders whose tasks have involved assigning individual advisery projects, traveling to the Midwest Veterans Closet to distribute food to families, and helping modernize distribution and outreach processes as demand at the Closet expands beyond what it was initially intended to serve.
“It was truly intended as a closet, a place for people to drop off clothing or buy clothing and contribute to it, and for our veterans and service members and active duty service members and families to get clothing,” Sego said.
In terms of the carnival, leaders’ handiwork can be found almost everywhere.
“They have distributed posters. They’ve reached out to feeder schools. They have created videos. Everything that you can see for Winter Carnival, they’ve been a part of it, or did it entirely on their own,” Simons said. And that commitment to service has impressed Sego, who likened leaders’ eagerness to serve families to six-year-olds playing soccer.
Service project leader David Pawasarat was initially drawn to the project as the grandson of a veteran, and echoes Sego’s emphasis on larger context and mindfulness.
“It’s not just, ‘Let me donate $20,’ but to have a purpose, and that’s to give back to the veterans, which I think is a very honorable cause,” he said, adding that he wants his classmates to “know that there’s a meaning behind all of this and have pride when you go on your field trip or work in the Winter Carnival.”
Pawasarat’s fellow leader, senior Caden Adrianopoli, echoed similar sentiments.
“You get to see that this community that literally sacrifices their lives for us and constantly gives their whole lives to this nation is being let down, and they’re not being provided for, and they’re suffering,” he explained. “That was really impactful for me.”
Part of the objective, Sego said, is exemplified by the project’s motto, “Serve with dignity.” A driving goal identified by the Midwest Veterans Closet, amid the myriad of projects necessitated by its expansion, was to maintain the retail-space feel of their North Chicago facility, which Sego notes can have a substantial impact on the mindsets of the veterans taking advantage of its resources.
“One of the biggest hurdles for veterans and active duty service members is getting over the pride of needing the help because they’ve dedicated their lives to serving this country, and they thought maybe that they would be served too,” he said.
Keeping that in the back of students’ minds is essential to maintaining the environment that draws veterans to utilize the Closet.
Even for students who aren’t involved as leaders, Simons and Sego hope the impact of the grade-wide project will provide an opportunity to step up on a smaller scale and leave an impact. Sego noted that some students who may struggle academically are otherwise gifted in tasks like working with children, and he enjoys seeing them embrace that role at the carnival.
Simons continued, describing the Carnival as a “legacy event.”
“What will you remember five years from now, ten years from now, the AP test that you missed or spending one single day touching somebody’s life? And I guarantee you 100% of people remember [the latter],” she said. “It’s definitely something I wish more seniors were thinking about.”
In the end, Winter Carnival is an opportunity for students to connect with and give back to the community they’ve grown up in.
“So many people remember going through it, and it’s sort of a way to pay back that experience to the younger generations, just to keep the culture going that this is a community that we hope our students will come back and contribute to in the same way,” Simons said.