What is the most important way to help the homeless? Warm sleeping bags? Rib-sticking meals? No, said a recent visitor to Jan Clitherow's and Lisa Horner's first- and sixth-grade Buddies group: the best thing we can offer is a sense of dignity.

JC Orton, the Coordinator of Night on the Streets, worked with the multi-age group at RDS last week to raise awareness of issues of homelessness and hunger, providing a full-circle lesson for Clitherow's first-graders who recently visited the Alameda County Food Bank and collect food donations weekly. Orton's Berkeley-based nonprofit has served over 100,000 meals to the homeless since 1997 and regularly draws on the Food Bank's resources for its supplies. Night on the Street runs an overnight shelter and soup nights in the winter, and gives out hundreds of sleeping bags a year to those J.C. finds on Berkeley streets.

Working together, the first- and sixth-grade students made lunches for Orton to deliver to his clients: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, tangerines, and chewy bars. Each bag lunch also included a hand-written note from a student, containing words of encouragement and understanding. Students also asked Orton insightful questions about his work with Berkeley's homeless people and watched a short video about the scope of his project.

"For a first-grader, spreading peanut butter and jelly can be hard work, a true labor of love, so this was an age-appropriate exercise in service learning that ties in perfectly with Jan Clitherow's yearlong teaching about hunger in our community," explained Service Learning Coordinator Becky Denison. "It was one part of a longer and deeper exploration of the subject that really engenders a sense of empathy and understanding in the students. They come to see that a bagged lunch is not a quick fix and that problems require sustained effort for true impact."

In the Lower School, service learning is integrated into core classroom instruction and mixed age "buddy" groups, with specific projects determined by individual teachers' curricula. Having older and younger students work together once a month is an important way to help them develop social and emotional skills, making Buddies an excellent setting for service learning activities.