Life begins at 60 for collectors

1:04pm Tuesday 15th April 2008

Comments (0)   Have your say »

Piles of glasses, tins of food, books and scarves are filling the classrooms of one Hampstead Garden Suburb.

To mark Kerem School's 60th anniversary, which also coincides with the 60th anniversary of the declaration of the State of Israel, one teacher devised a way to couple celebrations with teaching the children the invaluable lesson of giving to charity.

The 60 for 60 social action project saw all seven classes at the school in Norrice Lea assigned a charity which is based in the United Kingdom, Israel or the developing world.

Each class's mission was to collect 60 relevant items in one month for the chosen charity, culminating in a formal handing-over ceremony next month.

For Vision Aid Overseas - which helps visually disadvantaged people in the Third World - pupils collected old children's glasses, a difficult commodity for the charity to come by.

Sick children in Israel's Laniado Hospital will benefit from the 60 CDs, videos and tapes collected by the pupils, and 60 tins of food will be sent to FareShare, which aims to relieve poverty in the UK.

Other charities benefiting from the children's hard work included World Jewish Relief, Kids Company, which works with vulnerable children in this country, and Water Aid.

Nicola Abery, a support worker at the school, devised the scheme.

She said: "I wanted to come up with a project that was meaningful to the children and thought it was important that it had a social action background.

"A lot of the kids who come here are very lucky and have had a privileged upbringing and, because it's a time when we're going to be celebrating, I thought it was important that they were aware of others.

"Social action is a philosophical concept that we want to instil in our children. It's more beneficial sometimes to recycle and find items to give to other people than just to open a chequebook."

Armed with the hundreds of items collected by the pupils, with help from their families and Kerem Nursery, Ms Abery has now organised a celebratory event at the beginning of May to help show the pupils what their hard work will do.

She said: "We are having a big celebration in which a representative from each charity will come in and talk to the pupils about what the charity will do with their gifts, and then we will formally give them everything we've collected.

"I don't think we were quite aware of how successful it would be."

And that feeling was echoed by the pupils. Nicola Maltz, ten, collected for Laniado Hospital.

She said: "It was great that the whole school was collecting things. It was interesting that each class was collecting for different charities. At the beginning we thought getting 60 items was really difficult, but everyone got really into it and we managed to get so much more."