Christchurch is getting used to bouncing back after trauma and crisis.

For many students, the Global Covid Pandemic and Level 4 lockdown was another one of these. Schools play a pivotal role in supporting students and communities.

Our community members' desire to help other members in the Ao Tawhiti community who were struggling through the initial round of lockdown was shown through the raising of nearly $5000. This was spent on food vouchers to support the members of our community who were struggling in lockdown. There was and still is a definite will to support and this is creating learning opportunities beyond the classroom that enable students to have a dramatic impact on their community.

Before we returned from lockdown some staff began planning ways to support student well being. Surveys had identified that students were missing collaborative learning and working with others as well as some concerns around students’ sense of well being. We recently read information around the “Victim Mindset” that was leaving students feeling a lack of control. We wanted to empower students to know that they could take back this control and have a positive impact on others, providing opportunities that increased their sense of agency and control.

The Student Volunteer Army has been reaching out to schools over the last few years helping secondary age students to find ways of supporting members of the wider Christchurch community. Working across a floor of our Year 7-13 students, we took the ideas from the SVA, mixed them with our own and came up with a list of themes for project based learning. Students spent at least half a day a week for half a term on a specific project of their choice. The themes below are what we finally settled on… within these themes students created projects.

• Fundraising for local charitable organisations or foodbanks.

• Contributing to the management of a local park, green space, urupa, marae ātea, playground, kindergarten.

• Helping protect our waterways and our marine life.

• Staying in touch with the elderly members of our community

• Offering assistance to at-risk members of our school community.

• Capturing our lockdown stories.

One of these projects saw some students reach out to the Red Cross to see if they could send messages of joy and hope to isolated members of the community, in particular the elderly and infirm. They wrote messages and created cards that were sent along with the daily meals on wheels. Our hope is that the Red Cross can now reach out to schools across the country to touch more of the elderly around New Zealand. Although Alpha, Meg and Layla will never meet the people they sent messages to, they feel a strong sense of empowerment. They know that they are part of something important and have touched the lives of people through their effort. The project has enriched their lives and hopefully the lives of the people they reached out too.