Maya DeAndrea ’25 was the first ninth grader to organize a service event through Service Committee this year. From April 11-April 22, DeAndrea organized a book drive to donate to Anna M. Sample House family shelter. The shelter is a part of a larger nonprofit organization, Volunteers of America Deleware Valley, which was founded in 1896. It is affiliated with 46 states and provides 40 different programs including homelessness, reentry, veterans’ assistance, and affordable housing. The Anna M. Sample House located in Camden, New Jersey, specifically provides emergency housing for women, children, and families that have experienced homelessness.

At Moorestown Friends School, service is an important core value found in both in school and extracurricular service opportunities. While service is a requirement for all high school students, it remains fairly uncommon for ninth graders to participate in organizing service events while in their first year of High School.

Maya DeAndrea ’25 touched on why she chose the Anna M. Sample House to receive the book donations: “I came up with the idea and I really wanted to help children who are in homeless shelters and when I thought of the books I thought it would be really impactful because they can like stay in those shelters and then tons of children that come through the shelters can use them.”

DeAndrea also provided insight on the inspiration for holding the book drive: “Reading was a really big part of my childhood, so I wanted to make sure that every child gets that opportunity too.”

The head of Service Committee, Gail Barna, spoke about DeAndrea and her ambitions with the book drive: “I love the fact that Maya came up with this on her own. She went through the right process by making a presentation to the service committee, getting it approved by Mr. Zackroff, and then bringing it to the whole upper school. It’s for the Anna M. Sample House, which is really great because a lot of Upper School students have a lot of extra books at home, and there are a lot of people that don’t have any, so it’s great that she thought of those who are less fortunate and try to get everybody to help them all.”

Barna additionally gave some advice for getting involved with service opportunities: “I think that people should always be looking around and saying, what can I do? Anytime you see someone in need or you see that you have extra things so ask yourself how you can help somebody else with this. For everything that we do we should always be thinking of what we can do to help other people because even doing little things makes a really big difference.”

DeAndrea hoped to inspire other Upper School students to engage in service opportunities: “I really hope that other people are motivated to engage in acts of service because if you have an idea and you’re motivated you can make a big change.”

The book drive culminated with a total of 234 books collected and donated. DeAndrea reflected on the drive by saying, “I’m really happy because one of my main concerns going in was if people were moved to donate after seeing the emails and posters so I’m really happy that people took the initiative and that it went really well.”

Barna acknowledged DeAndrea’s success stating, “Well she followed the correct protocols so the service committee could help her and spread the word through their social media posts. Additionally, this is a good time of year when people are cleaning out and thinking of others. I think people want to do good things so if you give them the opportunity and advertise it to them they’ll always come through for you.”