Friends of the Alliance

This year, students in the sixth-grade class at Friends Academy in Locust Valley, NY, chose four organizations and charities to receive profits from a year’s worth of fundraising; among them was the Alliance to Save Energy.

The Friends Academy year-long read-a-thon, in which students seek reading sponsors at the rate of a dollar a book, is a sixth-grade tradition. With these funds and others generated from additional community service projects, the 60 sixth-grade students raised around $8,000 this year.

Your average sixth-grader would have creative ideas about how to spend this money. But Friends Academy, a Quaker School in Long Island, encourages school-wide fundraising for one purpose: to give away the profits. After researching various charities and organizations the students reach consensus – a valued tenant of Quakerism – as to where the money should go.

“There is a lot of talk about the environment and global warming at the school, and the kids are aware of it. We have quite a few initiatives in place already, like a LEED-certified lower school and a no-idling policy, so it’s not surprising the students picked the Alliance,” says Dan Kriesberg, a sixth-grade teacher.

For the Alliance, receiving a check for $1000 from a sixth-grade class in New York was a complete surprise.

But for the students at Friends Academy, reading books, washing cars, raising money, and giving it away is just what you do in the sixth-grade.

Says Kriesburg, “When they get to the seventh-grade, they do a walk-a-thon.”