One of the most active service organizations in town, the New Canaan High School Service League of Boys, turns 20 this year.
As school starts Thursday, we put some questions to its communications team, led by Sarah Wrede, to mark the milestone.
Here’s our exchange.
***
New Canaanite: For those who haven’t heard of the Service League of Boys or “SLOBs” at New Canaan High School, please tell us a little about the organization’s history.
Sarah Wrede: SLOBs was founded 20 years ago this fall by a group of service-minded mothers who wanted to educate their sons on the importance of volunteering in their community. The National Charity League (NCL), a national mother-daughter service organization, had been introduced in New Canaan in the early 1990s, but there wasn’t a similar organization for boys. And NCL wasn’t part of the high school. So these mothers and their sons put together a proposal for a service club just for them. They met with Ari Rothman, the Assistant Principal at New Canaan High School who oversaw the student clubs (and still does today), and Ari enthusiastically supported the idea. The founding members unanimously approved the name Service League of Boys, or SLOBs for short. And here we are 20 years later, the biggest student club at NCHS with 270 student members and growing!
What does SLOBs do?
In a nut-shell, we’re teaching the boys to care about the well-being of their community and how to make a difference. Our mission is to encourage and develop community responsibility and leadership in our sons by connecting them with volunteer opportunities at philanthropies that need help. We currently serve more than 50 non-profit organizations in New Canaan and the surrounding towns. (You can see the full list on our website at newcanaanslobs.org.) On any given afternoon or weekend, you may find SLOBs helping to rebuild stone walls with the New Canaan Land Trust, packing weekend meal bags for kids at the Filling In the Blanks warehouse in Norwalk, playing bingo with residents at the Waveny Life Care Center, or staffing the registration table at a Red Cross blood drive. Name a local non-profit and there’s a really good chance we help them. Last year, SLOBs student and parent members volunteered an impressive 3,244 hours! And that’s just a single year. Multiply that by 20 years and you get a sense of the impact we’ve had. We think it’s fair to say that SLOBs has become an invaluable part of New Canaan.
What is it that makes SLOBs so popular among high school students?
You mean aside from the fact they get to walk around wearing a t-shirt with “SLOBs” emblazoned in red across the front?! In all seriousness, the boys quickly discover that giving back is genuinely fun and rewarding, and then they tell their friends. When they’re volunteering, they’re not sitting in a room staring at a screen, which we know is not good for their mental health. They’re out in the community interacting with other boys at volunteer events and SLOBs meetings; with their parents and guardians who are volunteering with them; with the leaders of the philanthropies we serve; and very often with the people those philanthropies are ultimately helping. We see this as an immeasurable benefit of SLOBs membership. To give you a couple of examples, two of our most popular events are the weekend Sports Buddies program and the Staying Put patio furniture moves in the fall and spring. Sports Buddies is a program for children and teens with special needs in Lower Fairfield County. On Saturday mornings, SLOBs meet them at the high school to play basketball and soccer. These events are so coveted that they fill up as fast as we can add them to our volunteer calendar. Given that they start at 9am on a Saturday, that should tell you something! The boys love getting to know the kids in the program. They also love getting to know New Canaan’s senior citizens with Staying Put. Every fall and spring, the boys help to move patio furniture for Staying Put members. They tell us how much they enjoy talking to the residents and hearing their stories, as evidenced by the fact many of the boys specifically ask to go back to the same house each fall and spring. It’s a rewarding experience for everyone involved. Beyond the relationships, SLOBs also offers the boys a chance to develop their leadership and public speaking skills by serving as a philanthropy liaison beginning their sophomore year and, later, joining the student board that runs the club in partnership with the parents. Our board members do everything from pulling together weekly newsletters, posting on the @nchs.slobs Instagram feed, organizing speakers for the general meetings, making sure events have enough volunteers, and keeping an eye on club finances. They get hands-on experience in running an organization.
How do students join?
Every boy enrolled at NCHS is eligible to join SLOBs. We’re a parent-son organization, so boys sign up along with a parent or guardian – it can be their mom, their dad, an uncle, a grandparent, or a family friend. All they need to do is fill out a quick online membership form on the SLOBs website, pay the $35 registration fee, and they’re in. During our membership year, which runs from June 1 to May 31, student members are expected to attend five general meetings and contribute a minimum of 10 service hours. Parent members are asked to contribute a minimum of five service hours. The vast majority of our members contribute much more than this.
What are some of the major success stories to come out of SLOBs in recent years?
We think the biggest success story is that, over the past 20 years, thousands of boys have come through SLOBs. These are young (and not-quite-as-young!) men who are now out in the world making a real difference in their new communities. In fact, we’re excited to be welcoming back some of the original SLOBs this fall to speak to our current membership about how SLOBs impacted their lives. These guys continue to pay it forward, and that’s a testament to the power of SLOBs.
What else, if anything, would you like to tell our readers about SLOBs?
We often get asked by parents of boys from other high schools in the area if their sons can join SLOBs. While we’re only open to boys enrolled at NCHS, we’re so delighted that they’ve noticed what SLOBs does and want their sons to be a part of that. It’s a badge of honor to be called a SLOB!