Guest article by Anusha Iyer, K2S high school volunteer
When Ashley signed up through her school’s newspaper club to participate in a pen pal program, she definitely didn’t expect to be spending hours helping kids write about wizards, owls, and runaway cookies who become pirates. Yet, here she was devoting hours of her time to help kids put their thoughts into writing, an alternate medium to the music they were already learning with Keys 2 Success (K2S). Now, usually three days per week, Ashley joins Keys 2 Success’s Zoom calls and patiently guides kids through the creative process of story writing. “Sometimes,” Ashley explains, “I draw pictures for the kids to give them ideas. I’m always so pleasantly surprised by how clever they are and the things they come up with!”
Ashley, like the four other new Keys 2 Success volunteers who joined this past April, never thought she would be committing hours of her time volunteering here. “I initially saw the announcement about a pen pal program through my school’s newspaper club. I was interested in the project at first because I was in a different pen pal program when I was younger, except I was the younger kid writing to someone older. This time, I thought it would be cool to be the older kid because the program benefitted me when I was younger, so I wanted to pay it forward. Then, I signed up for an interview to become a volunteer, which, by the way, was just for volunteer hours. But once I got myself into this program, I started to really love working with the kids.”
Like Ashley, Ella, Alondra, and Emely are students attending Union County Vocational-Technical Schools (UCVTS) who recently joined K2S as volunteers, and they were also surprised by what the pen pal event led them to. “The whole experience was so much fun and I got to meet so many people through the game day that was set up to meet our pen pals. I also got to learn a lot about K2S and bring my graphic design skills to the team,” Ella Platts, a sophomore at UCVTS’s School of Design expressed. Alondra Martinez, another student at UCVTS, also shared her thoughts about the pen pal program, saying “It’s fun to write letters in a world where everything has become more online. If I were younger, I would have loved to have an older pen pal.”
However, aside from the benefits of working with the kids and clocking in the hours, each of the new high school volunteers recounts the invaluable perspective they’ve gained over the last few months. “Even though I’ve been connected to Newark my whole life,” Emely Duraes, a sophomore at the Teacher Academy at UCVTS explains, “I guess I finally saw that kids in Newark, especially, didn’t have the same opportunities to learn music. By learning about all the different projects that K2S was doing, I was like ‘Wow, this is an amazing project; the kids aren’t just learning music, but they’re experiencing their community and finding out that they have the potential to do more than what the world is telling them to do,’ and it’s so amazing.” Alondra expressed similar reflections upon the insights she’s gained thus far, saying “So far, my experience highlights the fact that these are just children, yet a lot is placed on their backs because they’re mostly part of minority groups. It must be really draining to have one aspect of your identity be seen as the only part of your identity, but there’s so much more to these kids other than just being from underprivileged areas of Newark. I’m looking forward to working more with the kids, creating a safe environment for them, and being a good influence for them.”
