Community Clubs: Clubs at SM East allow students to connect with their community and learn about diverse perspectives

SM East is home to over 1,600 students and is located between 75th St. and Mission Rd. However beyond the five-story brick building, students find ways to connect with others in the surrounding community. 78% of students participate in one of the various clubs at SM East, according to an Instagram poll of 135 respondents. Take a look at how a few of these clubs and activities allow students to interact with the community and learn valuable life skills.

While the Environmental Club meets in room 325 every Wednesday to discuss topics like composting systems and preventing unsustainable practices, their work isn’t confined to those four walls, or even just the SM East building. Whether it’s picking up soda cans down at Roe Park’s creek or planting carrots in the community garden to donate to a local pantry, the Environmental Club is constantly out in the community.

“We like to think about taking care of our surroundings and that taking care of the space around us allows for it to take care of us,” senior and club president Shubra Dugravathi said. “It’s kind of like a stewardship aspect.”

The club’s strongest community outreach comes from their work in the community garden located in Harmon Park, according to club vice president and senior Ishaan Home. Throughout the year, students maintain and plant crops in the garden, such as tomatoes, peppers, carrots and beets. 

Once they harvest the produce, the club then gives the vegetables to teachers, firefighters and the Village Presbyterian Church Food pantry. Last year, the club was able to donate 50-70 lbs. of produce to people in need.

“I think the community garden is really big,” Home said. “Like creating produce for people who are underprivileged, and also for people at East, like part of the community.”

However, Dugravathi learned just this month that the Prairie Village Community Garden Council has decided to make the garden a pollinator garden instead of a vegetable garden, meaning the environmental club will no longer be able to plant crops. 

“It was kind of sad to hear that they were just gonna abandon the idea of having a food-producing plot that was run by the students and instead go for something that was lower maintenance,” Dugravathi said. “But at the same time, it is important to have gardens like that, so there's still a need for that, and especially when you're attracting pollinators.”

According to Dugravathi and Home, the club is still planning to assist with the pollinating garden, but they are currently looking for other gardens they could get a plot in to continue their produce donations in the future. 

Even without the vegetable garden, the club will still be very involved in the community by participating in regular creek cleanups and promoting sustainability through fruture projects, according to Dugravathi and Home.

“I think that being part of a community is really important for the club because it helps people get integrated into a community beyond the school, which helps people see what it's like out there, like beyond themselves, kind of really gets people involved,” Home said.

The Multicultural Student Union hosted its annual culture fair on March 31, with around 20 student-led stands representing worldly cultures from Puerto Rico to the Ukraine, each bringing in snacks and artifacts like Mexican conchas and Pakistani bracelets.  

Senior Bella Broce has led the Panama stand since the fair started three years ago. At the fair, she shared her country’s history and traditions, along with her personal heritage, with students and staff. Broce believes that the culture fair and the MCSU altogether have made her feel more welcomed at SM East and have allowed her to further connect with the diverse community around her.

“When I was able to go to East and the multicultural club started, I kind of felt like I found a place because I got to see so many people who are so proud of their heritage, their family, their culture, their religion, and it just made me really, really proud of my Panamanian roots,” Broce said.

Turn The Page KC

Junior Katharine Sally is an avid reader, and it's all thanks to her elementary school librarian helping her discover her passion.

And as a team leader in Junior Board, she helps members of her community foster a passion for literature, just as her former librarian did for her.

Junior board is a school club that involves students forming groups and choosing a charity to research throughout the year. In April, the groups present to a panel of judges who choose which groups receive grant money to donate to the charity they chose.

The charity that Sally’s group chose is Turn The Page KC, an organization that helps parents teach their kids how to read and donates books to children in the community who are in need. According to Sally, Turn The Page KC donated around 10,000 books last year.

“[Turn The Page KC] is all about literacy at a very young age in underserved communities,” Sally said.

According to Sally, sharing her passion for reading with the hundreds of children in her community is important to her.

And alongside helping to spread her love of reading, being a part of Junior Board and getting to help out those in her community has been meaningful to Sally.

“Being there and seeing the community rallying around each other and helping each other has been really influential [to me],” Sally said.

Hope Faith

When then-seventh-grader Catherine Beltrame joined Junior Board, she never expected to bring the president of the charity Uplift to tears, touched by the presentation Beltrame prepared for his organization.

Now in her senior year, Beltrame is an executive and team leader on the Junior Board club. Alongside being on Junior Board to gain experience in public speaking, team work and helping others, it's a way for her to connect to the community around her.

“I think Junior Board is such a community-oriented club,” Beltrame said.

This year to give a hand to the community, Beltrame’s group chose Hope Faith, an organization that helps the homeless population of Kansas City in a variety of ways, from providing shelter to offering haircuts to those in need.

They decided to support Hope Faith in hopes of making a change after learning that Kansas City has the most homeless people per capita of any city in the U.S.

Constantly working with the people around her, Beltrame has experienced many moments with her community that she cherishes, for example, when people in need have asked for her to pray for them while she’s volunteering.

“I always find it beautiful that people I hardly know are willing to foster a sense of trust and community in sharing their experiences,” Beltrame said.

SHARE Executive Luke Taylor counted 25 newborn diapers, placed them on a shelf and tossed them to SHARE Executive and senior Bella Broce. Broce fastened a large zip tie around the stack, then placed a large heat-sealed plastic sheet around the diapers using a machine operated by senior Charlotte Wissel.

At the end of the senior-run assembly line, SHARE Executive Maile Tormohlen placed a sticker on the diaper pack, signifying the diaper size. 

“I felt very grateful that I got to spend a morning at Happy Bottoms, where I knew I was making a difference,” Broce said. “I 100% will be coming back in the future.”

But, beyond the walls of the warehouse and into the KC Metro community, the Happy Bottoms Diaper Bank provides diapers to 79 distribution sites according to their website. To date, they have distributed over 34 million diapers since their start in 2009. 

The SM East SHARE organization uses Happy Bottoms as one of its 75 philanthropy organizations, providing them five to seven with monthly volunteers. According to Happy Bottoms development director and SM East parent Sally Cook, the organization gets around 125 student volunteers each month.  

The diapers are already distributed to families within only a month of the diaper assembly line. This quick turnaround helps the 21,000 children in the KC Metro area who need diaper assistance, according to the 2020 US Census. 

“By providing diapers, we give families a hand up to be able to go to work, to make sure that their babies are clean, dry and healthy,” Happy Bottoms co-executive director Susan Belger Angulo said. “We're supporting families to be able to do things that they might not otherwise be able to do if we weren't there.”

The experiences SHARE provides help students open their eyes to their community, giving back what they can, which, to most teenagers, is their time.

In just the two hours the SHARE Execs volunteered at Happy Bottoms, hundreds of diapers were packaged, helping hundreds of community families. 

“Getting the firsthand experience has made me realize what is going on in my community,” Tormohlen said. “I never even thought that there were families that couldn't afford diapers.”