St Helens students capture the essence of Lasallian ethos
Students at De La Salle School St Helens continue to explore new ways to live the Lasallian ethos. In recent times they have been busy interviewing Brothers in the nearby St John’s House Community, helping others through a podcast and helping fight food poverty.
Interviewing the Lasallian Brothers
The Lasallian Brothers are a loved and valued branch of our school community, but with the average age of our local Lasallian house being 85, it is becoming more and more difficult for the Brothers to attend school.
Wanting to connect with the Lasallian Brothers, the students set about getting some time to meet them properly. In our most recent podcast episode Lucy explains: “the number of the Brothers is decreasing and there are only a small number of Brothers left…the main reason for interviewing the Brothers was to find out what it is like, but what I took away from the visit is that we need to encourage more people to at least consider what life could be like if they joined, the Brothers are really important to our Lasallian community”.
Jessica then shared her opinion that we are all part of the Lasallian family, and although we don’t often get to visit the Brothers, we should make more of an effort to be aware of them and their contribution to our school family.
The main aim of conducting these interviews was to capture the memories of the remaining Lasallian Brothers and create an archive of their lives, but through the work of the students they have spread a message that you should be proud to live out your beliefs and religion, especially if you’re doing so to devote yourselves to the service of others.
Peer-to-Ear Podcast
SVP Youth consider all needs of the community, they break down the idea that a “need” is purely financial, they explore how to address emotional needs, educational needs and spiritual needs of others.
The group felt that there was an opportunity for them to reach a large group of students, share important information, discuss big topics and promote activities by running a new podcast for form classes to listen to.
They record this podcast in groups and it is then shared as our extended worship throughout the week. So far they have shared the work of fantastic organisations, like Oliver King Founder. They have even discussed exam pressure and how to support yourself and siblings during times of exam and assessment.
They will continue with this project into next year, with the hope of getting some special guests on board to speak…the idea of special guest is important to the team, which leads on nicely to another big project they’re working on at the moment.
Founder’s Food
Working with an organisation called MCKS, our group have developed a stock of surplus food for our school community to use. This movement is to break down barriers to learning. SVP Youth recognised that if students and their families are hungry, or making other sacrifices for food, then their ability to attend school and access their learning becomes limited.
The pantry for our school community is now up and running. With that, there is a plea to our wider community, if you have any food items that you could donate through the year, please do bring them in to school.
Equally, if you are in need of some support please do reach out. Though the students are responsible for the upkeep of the pantry, the service is completely confidential. Please reach out to Sam, our Chaplain (cantillons@delasalleschool.org.uk) if you are in of additional support accessing food throughout the month.
The message from SVP Youth is that anybody can be in need of support at any time, they’re on a mission to end the stigma surrounding food support.
This is a service for people to give and receive. The mission of MCKS is to promote that idea that “when you help one person, you help the world” as a way of encouraging people to “pay it forward” and that is what we would like to do.
