Serving the Greater Good — and the Concord Community

SPS students transform a Saturday morning into a lesson in leadership, teamwork and compassion at a city food pantry.

BY KRISTIN DUISBERG

Given a surprise day off from classes just two weeks into the academic year, it would be understandable if St. Paul’s School students dedicated their free morning to sleeping late and enjoying a leisurely brunch before afternoon activities. Last Saturday, however, so many of them were eager to volunteer for a service-learning opportunity in downtown Concord led by Kate Daniels, the School’s director of community engagement, that Daniels had to close her signup sheet only 15 minutes after posting it.

“There were many, many kids who wanted to participate,” Daniels says of the project to help the city’s Christ the King Parish set up and stock its new community food pantry, a space that served 8,165 individuals from 3,071 households in 2024. The School’s dean of student support as well as the inaugural holder until earlier this year of the Kiril Sokoloff ’65 Chair, which was established to support a faculty member who is an inspirational leader in the School community, Daniels describes the student response as amazing. “I was smiling all weekend,” she says.

Working in two-hour shifts started at 8:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., 50 students and SPS adults that included Daniels, Rector Kathy Giles, Vice Rector for School Life Theresa Ferns ’84, P’19, Associate Director of Admissions Michelle Hung P’29 and Math Teacher Sean Ryan started out at a local warehouse to load pantry donations from the New Hampshire Food Bank onto waiting U-Haul trucks. At the new pantry behind the parish’s church on South Main Street, some volunteers assembled metal shelving that others quickly filled with canned and boxed foods, toiletries and more, working bucket brigade style alongside members of the parish.

“Loading the pantry donations connected us with the church community instantly since we were all doing the same thing, trying to help out as much as we can,” says Sophia Zhang ‘27. “The experience was extremely rewarding, and we kept talking about it even after our shift.”

By 12:30, the shelves were fully stocked in preparation for the pantry’s official ribbon-cutting and upcoming open houses, and the SPS volunteers were ready to enjoy a pizza lunch, their Saturday morning efforts a tangible extension of a longstanding partnership between the School and the parish. Both students and staff volunteer at the food pantry; over the summer, St. Paul’s joined nearly three dozen other local nonprofits and civic and religious organizations to support Christ the King’s $2.55 million dollar fundraising goal to make the new pantry a reality.

For Daniels, the morning was also a tangible extension of the School’s work to nurture compassion, kindness and a desire to serve others … and a heartwarming example of how readily students respond when offered opportunities to act in service to the greater good. In a Chapel Talk ahead of the project in which she shared the origins of her own bent toward service, inspired by her mother and grandmother before her, she also challenged students to think of ways their teams, ensembles, clubs, organizations, houses and even classes can be of service to others.

“This year, my main goal as the director of community engagement is to work with you in creating opportunities to put those words — service to the greater good — into action,” she told the student body. “Share your ideas with me and I will work hard to find a way to make them happen if at all possible.”

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