“Peace. Love. Soap.” Service Project Helps Summer Campers in Need

By: Alicia Sands Lurry

Just like their school mascot, students at Morris Brandon Elementary School are busy little bees. For the fourth time this school year, students in kindergarten through fifth grade embarked on a school-wide service project designed to help individuals in need.

This time around, students donated everything from toothbrushes, toothpaste and socks, to rain ponchos, insect repellant, and body wash, as part of their “Peace. Love. Soap.” service project to benefit campers at Camp Evergreen in north Georgia. Organized by fifth grader Ceci Motley, the project called for students to collect camping essentials for children at Camp Evergreen’s two mission camps. More than 400 items were collected.

The service project was created by fifth grader Ceci Motley

Ceci and her classmates count and organize the donations.

In addition to their most recent effort, students also spearheaded three other projects. Those included: a Halloween candy drive for troops overseas; “Coins for Haiti,” which raised over $1,800 to fund a school library for the Haiti Deaf Academy; and “Heart for the Homeless,” an initiative for which students filled 200 shoe boxes with items benefiting the homeless in Atlanta.

Principal Kara Stimpson said each project demonstrates service in action.

“The goal of our work is to provide opportunities for every student to engage in community service, so with each of these projects, every classroom and student is involved in some way,” Stimpson said. “As an International Baccalaureate school, global action is part of what we do, and this has been a meaningful way to provide all of our students with an opportunity to experience that.”