By Claire Hines, Year 11
During this school year, two year twelve students, undertook a truly inspirational C.A.S. project: to collect crochet and fabric squares in order to make quilts for homeless people.
The idea was originally put forward by the mother of one of the students, who also later contributed around one hundred crochet squares she had made to their initiative. They made this their C.A.S. (Creative activity service) project for the International Baccalaureate.
In order to collect as many squares as possible, they decided to enlist the aid of the Secondary school and Middle school, though they concentrated their efforts mostly on the former as its students proved more proactive. In order to publicize their project, they put up posters around the establishment and launched a contest of which mentor class would give in the most squares, promising a prize to said, mentor group.
However, the undertaking was far from easy. One of the students said: “We experienced some setbacks especially with trying to get the whole school to participate, we also had setbacks involving the time we had and the fact that winter break was coming faster than we expected. It was also quite scary trying to get everything done in time and the worry that not many people would get involved was also in the back of our minds.”
Upon consulting the principal on methods to let people know what they were doing and get them to participate, he proposed they speak at the next assembly, which turned out to be the very same day. This they proceeded to do and enabled them to get the attention of the entirety of the school Secondary school.
They went around mentor classes in December, showing an example of what the quilts would look like in the end, and reminding students that they could make a difference to homeless people even by making such a small contribution.
Now they are spending much of their free time knitting to add to the quilts, stuffing, and sewing up the fabric squares, and putting them together to make quilts. So far, they have completed two or three of the latter. They are looking for charities, at the moment who would be interested in distributing them to people in need.
One of the students has said that: “This has been a wonderful and fun experience for the both of us […] seeing people’s (especially teachers) engagement with this project. We hope to maybe extend it more or do it again and better next school year.”
