At Falk, our students, teachers, and families are constantly seeking opportunities to serve the community around them. It’s a natural consequence of the school’s Wonder, Care, Act philosophy, which emphasizes curiosity and compassion, both within the school walls and beyond. 

At the start of the 2024–25 school year, Director Dr. Jill Sarada highlighted this shared compassion and invited the community to continue elevating service in their lives. In answering this call, students and teachers have identified new ways to connect classroom and extracurricular activities to service while also continuing beloved traditions like assembling care kits for neighbors in need. The school also held its first-ever Day of Service on April 15 and hopes to continue the tradition in years to come.

Fighting Food Insecurity

Foster Love Project 

During the 2024 holiday season, LGBTQIA+ and Activism Club organized a three-week donation drive to collect shelf-stable food and toys for local families. Matt Picklo, a Falk history teacher and the club’s sponsor, said they hoped to “help those in times of need this holiday season.” 

To spread the word, students made colorful flyers to hang around the school and shared their message in community newsletters to families. By the end of December, they had several boxes of food and toys to donate to the Foster Love Project, a nonprofit organization that supports foster children and families in the Pittsburgh area. 

Empty Bowls 

In January, art teacher Deborah Lieberman invited all faculty and staff to make ceramic bowls together. Once finished, the bowls were donated to the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank for a fundraiser dinner. The event supported Empty Bowls, an international project to fight hunger through art. Each attendee received a ceramic bowl donated by the community, and the money raised from ticket sales was donated to soup kitchens, food banks, and other organizations fighting food insecurity in Pittsburgh. 

Sending Support to Our Neighbors 

Ride the Wave 

Pitt graduate student Lily Bossler visited shortly before winter break for a read-aloud and service activity in Falk Library. In addition to studying Applied Developmental Psychology, Lily is the author of Ride the Wave, a children’s book inspired by her two-year-old cousin, Lyla. 

When Lyla began suffering from a prolonged and undiagnosed illness a few years ago, Lily searched for a children’s book that could help Lyla make sense of the experience and process her feelings of fear. Finding none, she decided to take matters into her own hands and write a book to help children like Lyla face their health-related anxiety with bravery and hope. 

During her visit, Lily read Ride the Wave to Falk’s first-grade students and invited them to share their experiences with sickness. Together, they discussed what it might be like to stay in a hospital and made cards for children staying in hospitals in Pittsburgh. Alongside hand-drawn pictures, students included thoughtful messages like "You are loved,” “The world cares for you,” and “Don’t feel scared when you get your tests.” 

Christopher’s Kitchen 

Throughout February, fourth-grade classrooms collected donations for Christopher’s Kitchen, a nonprofit organization that stocks food pantries at local hospitals. "The last thing families who have a child in the hospital should worry about is food,” the organization says, and providing access to a quick bite or meal can be a saving grace to parents and families caring for loved ones in the hospital. Christopher’s Kitchen also offers take-home bags to alleviate the stress and financial burden of stopping for food on the way home from a long hospital visit. 

During the Falk collection, decorated heart boxes were placed in the cafeteria and teacher break room, and faculty and staff were invited to donate at least one item each. Along with the food items, fourth graders created Valentine’s Day cards to share with hospitalized children through the organization. 

Care Kits 

An annual tradition at Falk is to create custom care kits for people in need. This year, kit materials were donated by second-grade families and included socks, nonperishable snacks, band-aids, and water. In December, Mr. Goodwin and Ms. Kaufman’s classes spent a day writing and decorating affirming notes and packing them into bags alongside food and care items. 

The finished care kits are now available in the Falk lobby for families, faculty, and staff to take home and share with their neighbors in need. 

Making Falk a Better Place 

In addition to serving the greater Pittsburgh area, middle school students have also offered their time and expertise to make improvements within the Falk community. Working in pairs or small groups, they started by observing the world around them and identifying areas for improvement—the first step in the Wonder, Care, Act framework. Then, caring about these issues and the people they were impacting, the students brainstormed sustainable solutions and began bringing them to life during Falk Woods class. 

In talking to Falk’s Primary teachers, one group discovered a pain point in the cafeteria clean-up process. When Primary students went to sort their compost, trash, and recycling at the end of lunch, they had nowhere to set down their lunchboxes, resulting in a chaotic back-and-forth between the tables and trash cans while students disposed of and gathered their belongings.

To streamline this process and eliminate extra trips, eighth graders used recycled materials from the WonderLab to build benches for the clean-up station. Now, Primary students can place their lunchboxes on the bench while they sort, making for a more efficient lunchtime dismissal. 

Another set of projects was born from the trash build-up on the Falk Woods hillside and trail system. After consistently noticing litter behind the fraternity complex, a group of sixth graders decided to post signs in the area, as well as send letters to their college-aged neighbors encouraging them to be mindful of the environment around them. 

Other projects include creating butterfly and bird houses, removing invasive grasses from the hillside, working on the fairy garden enclosure for Primary students, and building Falk Woods gates out of a recycled wood palette. Lori Wertz, Falk Woods instructor, says her students are aware that their work here will continue to have an effect after they leave, and they want that legacy to be a positive one. 

School-Wide Day of Service 

On April 15, faculty, staff, and students came together for Falk Cares, the first school-wide Day of Service at Falk. Organized by a faculty service committee, the event featured a special morning assembly followed by an hour and a half of service projects in and around the school community. 

Caitlyn Crowder and Samantha Varela, staff members from the Office of Engagement and Community Affairs at Pitt kicked off the morning with a kid-friendly discussion of community, volunteerism, and civic engagement. They explained that communities can be small, like your lunch table, classroom, or family, or big, like the State of Pennsylvania or even the United States. They also encouraged students to follow their passions when it comes to serving the community. If you’re a nature lover, did you know you can volunteer at Phipps? If you love sports, what about being a referee or volunteer coach when you’re older? 

After their remarks, four students from fifth grade read Just Help!, a book by Sonia Sotomayer about lending a hand for big and small causes alike. Afterward, students were dismissed for service work. 

Second graders set off on a walking field trip to collect trash in local neighborhoods, while their kindergarten and first-grade peers stayed behind for spring cleaning throughout the school. 

Third grade settled in to decorate placemats for Meals on Wheels, and fourth graders made several kinds of dog toys for Humane Animal Rescue of Pittsburgh. 

In fifth grade, students divided into groups to catalog classroom books, tend to the Falk Woods herb and flower boxes, help with school cleaning duties, or sort art supplies with Ms. Capezzuti.

Middle school students also split up, with some groups traveling into the community while others stayed at Falk to pack care kits, repair classroom and playground equipment in the WonderLab, organize the PE supply closet, and tidy up the middle school science room.

Off-campus projects included band and chorus performances at the Healthy Active Living (HAL) Senior Center in Greenfield, a trash and invasive species clean-up at South Side Park, and a trip to the Community Human Services food pantry in Oakland. 

Already, students and teachers are expressing their gratitude for the day and hoping to repeat the event annually. As one sixth grader says, there's so much more to be done!