Leading With Service
This past week, the Rady family did its part to make a positive impact on the surrounding community. Rady students, alumni, faculty and staff all pitched in for the two events planned by the student-run Learning with Service organization. Last Sunday morning, the gang met at Tourmaline Beach for a 2-hour beach cleanup. It turns out that picking up trash on a beach isn’t that difficult, and the time really flies when you’re engaged in meaningful conversation – not to mention, we were getting some decent color throughout the process. Until surfers and beach-goers took the opportunity to thank a group of us, I had completely forgotten that the task was voluntary. When you take into consideration the homemade cookies & muffins, solid dose of Vitamin D, and the upbeat convo with classmates, 90-minutes of community service sounds pretty inviting. After two more clean-ups, I’m pretty sure Rady will have officially “adopted” Tourmaline Beach. And in other news, performing a Sunday-morning beach cleanup is all that’s needed to help rationalize Mimosas & Bloody Mary’s at Bareback before noon.
The second service event of the week was held this past Wednesday night – A Quiz Bowl fundraiser to generate funds for The Nicholas Conor Institute. Beth Anne Baber (Rady Alum), Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of TNCI, provided a heartfelt introduction into the work being done by the Institute, which is dedicated to identifying cures and therapies for childhood cancers. We then made the difficult transition to the Jeopardy-style trivia game, which asked questions from topics that included Astronomy, Sports, Music, and Transportation. We saw some disparity develop within the leaderboards, as five teams finished with 106 points and above, with the remaining five teams scoring 95 and below (yikes!) In the final Jeopardy round, we saw the most movement in the standings, leading to a suspenseful climax – “in Jeopardy” eventually beat out “Earls of Wisdom” by a measly two points. All in all, the 50+ attendees all felt like winners. And the beach clean-up saw a similar number of people turn out to make a contribution. This week alone, nearly 100 members of the Rady family gave back. Clearly, there’s a strong interest in participating in community service projects – but creating awareness for these opportunities isn’t always easy. Many thanks go out to those who make these events possible!