A Day of Service with the EPIC Service Warriors
A recap of the Annual Boston Serve event
More than 150 volunteers came out to EPIC’s annual Boston Serve event on Saturday, November 4th to transform classrooms at the Mildred Avenue K-8 School in Mattapan while celebrating young leaders with disabilities who are dedicating a year of their lives to becoming leaders in their communities.
EPIC is a program that prepares youth with disabilities to be actively engaged community leaders through education, leadership development, and community service. EPIC’s community of leaders – Service Warriors, Alumni, and Board Members led all projects at the event and provided detailed instructions and quality control measures to all volunteers. Boston Serve is the program’s largest annual service day and fundraiser.
The Mildred Ave. K-8 School staff identified 16 classrooms that were in need of a fresh coat of paint. The school’s Principal, Andrew Rollins, remarks during the opening ceremony highlighted how the service day was a part of his school’s recent overall success story, “Your service makes a world of difference to our students, our school, and our community.” While painting the classrooms provide obvious aesthetic benefits, they also produce bright new learning environments in which children can grow and focus on the exciting challenges that await them on a daily basis. Volunteers also created 50 classroom supply kits to accompany the newly painted rooms while accommodating volunteers’ various skills and abilities.
The event was truly a community-wide effort, as volunteers came from Uber, State Street, MFS, Curry College, and City Year Boston combined forces with financial backers like Comcast and the Multi-Cultural Independent Living Center of Boston to make the event possible. Massachusetts State Senator Linda Dorcena Forry (1st – Suffolk) also joined in to view firsthand the great community effort being undertaken in her district. Her cousin, EPIC Service Warrior Tyler McManus, introduced her during the opening ceremony to demonstrate the wide-reaching nature of the Boston Serve event.
EPIC’s 5th Annual Boston Serve was a great success and exemplified the power of community service and youth leadership in transforming our communities.
“We are so very grateful for the work of the EPIC team in transforming our classrooms. They truly did miraculous work and had a huge impact in creating a better space for our wonderful students.”
-Principal Rollins
To see more pictures from this year’s event click here.