Alumnae
Brittany Fried and Caroline Scown deserve to be acknowledged together for their work on developing HKIS’s “Teaching for Empowerment” program.
It all started in 2010, when they both attended the school’s Service Summit and were inspired to organize a “Vow of Silence” project in the Middle School that raised HKD$85,000 (about USD$11,000) – enough to build a school in Kenya; provide textbooks, furniture, teacher training, and a six-month lunch program, and even buy a goat for a family.
The two girls were involved in HKIS’s four-day “Teaching for Empowerment” Interim trip to the Concordia Ambur and Concordia Pernmabut schools in southern India since its inception in 2012. In March 2014 and 2015, they were the student leaders of the trip. For more information about the 2015 trip, see this blog post by Dr. Marty Schmidt.
Leading up to Interim in 2015, they wrote and published “The Empowerment Handbook: Service Through Empowerment,” thanks to funding from The James A. Handrich Endowment Fund. According to an article in DragonTales (Summer 2015), “The pair worked tirelessly to refine lesson plans, worksheets and workshops, and to publish this as a sustainable, cross-cultural curriculum for the Interim Empowerment Program. The program unites HKIS students as peer leaders with children around the world to gain skills and confidence through these workshops. The goal is for workshop participants to be inspired to take action around social justice issues in their communities.”
One High School Counselor remarked, “When I think of HKIS’s mission of dedicating our minds to inquiry, our hearts to compassion, and our lives to service and global understanding, the first student that comes to my mind is Brittany Fried. She always went above and beyond, dedicating herself to the improvement of the HKIS community and the global one at large.”
Brittany is currently studying at Georgetown University and Caroline is at the University of Pennsylvania. They continue to commit themselves to service projects in many countries.