A Helping Hand

by Ryan Hennigan

Community service is not about stacking up one’s college application or resume. It is not about doing things so that one might be proud or arrogant about it; and it certainly should not be done expecting a reward or praise. Neither should it be looked upon as a chore. Community service is supposed to happen when people genuinely want to help others and build a stronger community out of their own generous hearts.
It would be a difficult task to find someone who better exemplifies this virtue in PHS than senior, Elise Verkade. Her four years of high school have been spent endlessly dedicated to bettering our society one step at a time.
Elise’s most dazzling service to the community, to choose from many, came when she donated 18 inches of her hair in her sophomore year to Locks for Love. Locks for Love is an organization that takes donations of hair and makes wigs mostly for children with cancer. They only ask for a ten inch donation, but Elise saw it fit to receive a buzz cut. She had 80 people sponsor her per inch that she had cut. In addition to the Locks for Love donation, she raised $1,500 from her sponsors; all of which she donated to St. Jude’s hospital for cancer research for children.
Elise gets her influence from an additional source: the Non-Denominational Unitarian Universalist Youth Group Church she is a member of in the First Parish of Norwell.
“The ideas that the church expresses are very influential to me. I have been so lucky to have all these people in our community that treat me so good, that I just want to give back to them as best as I can,” said Elise.
Elise is involved in a couple other major community service programs. One of them is part of her National Honors Society senior service project; in which, along with her partner Alexa Teevens, she is cleaning up all the trails in the woods, making maps for them, and giving the maps to the Town Recreational Center so they can use them for things such as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts activities. She also works at the Crossroads for Kids in the summer. She works as Camp Wing in Duxbury as a counselor, but prior to this, all her experience there was community service in which she monitored and held activities for the kids at the summer camp.
Students at PHS are required to do 40 hours of community service by graduation. Mandatory community service for graduation became popular after a study was done in 1994 to prove that, 85% of the time, students who maintain a weekly community service record are most likely to succeed and have a higher grade point average than those who do none at all.
A true helper and example-setter for the community never stops. Her goal for the future is to join Big Brothers, Big Sisters; a group that matches adults with children to help the children reach their potential and a group that Elise has already unsuccessfully tried to join, but she has to wait until she is 21 to be a mentor.