We are all in this together.
Community action and sustainability are part of the fabric of Town. These themes, often intertwined, inform our curriculum, and affect how we consume energy and seek to minimize our environmental impact through daily practices. Our extended family—students, parents, faculty, staff, and alumni/ae families—often gathers for service projects as well, so students understand their ability to affect change in the broader world as well. We often tell students “Everything we do, and everything we don't do, makes a difference” so they’re imbued, at an early age, with a sense of agency and personal responsibility in their day-to-day choices.
In the Lower School, there are frequent conversations about helping others, sustainability, and being good scholars, citizens, and leaders. In the Upper School, students develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the systems impacting our world, culminating in a civic engagement program spanning 7th and 8th grades.
Community Action
Projects that center the needs of our community members allow adults to model conscientious behavior to children. They also integrate classroom lessons and help students understand the impact of systemic inequities onto real human beings.
Grassroots Grocery
Our partnership with Grassroots Grocery focuses on fighting food insecurity in East Harlem and the South Bronx. This past year, we engaged with Grassroots Grocery in two ways: student civic engagement with the community fridge in East Harlem and family volunteering to pack and distribute meals in the South Bronx.
LSA Family Health Service
Every year, Town holds a winter clothing drive for those in need. This past year, we partnered with LSA Family Health Service. Students, families, and employees participated to donate winter clothes (hats, gloves, coats, jackets, pants, socks) with the Community Action Senate group and Town’s Team in Blue assisting with sorting.
Project Cicero
Every March Town families join this organization’s efforts to collect gently used or new children’s books to help supplement libraries in under-resourced schools. Town continues to be one of the largest school contributors to the NYC Project Cicero Book Drive.
Rise Against Hunger
Each year we come together as a community for Rise Against Hunger to package nutritious meals for distribution to families in need all over the world. At our April 2023 event, we created over 20,000 meal packages!
Ronald McDonald House
Town hosts annual drives for the Ronald McDonald House NYC Parents Pantry Program, which provides non-perishable food and supplies for families staying at the Ronald McDonald House while their children receive treatment for pediatric cancer.
Sandwiches for the Hungry
During their buddy visits after All School Assemblies, Town classes take turns making sandwiches for local soup kitchens and food pantries. It’s an activity students of all ages love and look forward to every year.
Sustainability Partnerships and Projects
Town’s commitment to sustainability has two guiding principles:
- The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals
- The Three E’s of Sustainability: Equity, Environment, and Economics.
Facilities
- This fall, we will unveil our new Ecology Lab. Programming will be piloted in grades K, 2, 5, and 7 in 2023-24, with additional grades being added in subsequent years.
- Town's facility shows a strong commitment to sustainability, including our efforts to use greener sources of paper, power, and cleaning supplies.
- Our cafeteria employs all reusable service wear including plates, glasses, mugs, and cutlery.
- We divert all snack wrappers for recycling.
- We collect used markers, pens, and pencils for recycling.
- We collect all organics from snacks and lunches as part of the NYC Sanitation Department's organic waste collection. Organic waste from Town’s lunch and snack is collected by the city for composting, rather than being trucked to landfills.
- We have water bottle filling stations to encourage reusable water bottle use.
- Many bathrooms have hand dryers.
- Many rooms feature motion-controlled lighting.
All School Activities
- Faculty, students, and alumni/ae participate in Mulchfest each January.
- Town holds e-waste recycling events each year.
- April Earth Day observances: Each year during Earth Week our community commits to making sustainable changes to our own lives, and each Division brings in developmentally-appropriate conversations and challenges to build new sustainable habits.
Upper School
- 5th and 6th graders study sustainability for six weeks each year as part of their Life Skills class.
- 7th and 8th grade students study sustainability as part of their Civic Engagement curriculum.
- The 5th grade science curriculum focuses on climate change and its effect on the environment including energy and alternative energy sources, and how the human impact on the environment can be reduced.
- The Upper School Sustainability Club meets weekly. Projects include:
- Collecting mugs, plates, and cutlery from classrooms and offices to return to the cafeteria.
- Sorting clothing in the Lost and Found. They return any labeled clothes to students. Any unlabeled clothes are sold at Parents’ Association uniform resale events for a nominal fee.
- Maintaining the Tower Garden. Since 2016-17 we have been growing our own vegetables and herbs with our Tower Garden. We periodically harvest greens for use in our school lunches - the ultimate in 'eating local.'
- Overseeing organics collection that is offered to the entire Town community one day each week before school.
- For Earth Week 2023, Town Upper Schoolers worked on several projects::
- 6th and 8th graders participated in workshops on sound and noise pollution with the Department of Environmental Protection at Town.
- 7th graders mulched, weeded, and composted at Van Cortlandt Park in The Bronx.
- 5th graders surveyed the Upper East Side for waste stream options, and wrote to city officials with requests for more recycling and Smart Compost bins. They received several responses, and thanks in part to their letters, 22 Smart Compost bins were installed on the Upper East Side!
Civic Engagement Program
All Town 7th and 8th graders engage in a two-year project, moving from a local to a global focus, grounded in sustained, hands-on community partnerships and engagement. The program launches during 7th graders’ September retreat. There, they learn about the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which will inform their study project. The overarching lens for the Civic Engagement Program is: healthy planet, human rights, and allyship; teachers choose the theme for the year in conjunction with Envoys, a nonprofit focused on global education. In a recent year, students focused on food justice through 12 weekly sessions. They explored this topic and its local implications through field trips to various organizations, such as an urban farm, a food pantry, and nonprofit with community fridges increasing access to fresh produce. Eighth graders continue their study with expert guest speakers and ongoing research that will culminate at the end of 8th grade in a year-end, service-based trip and then a teach-in, sharing with Town peers what they learned over the two years about their greater community, and themselves. Read more on Town's Civic Engagement Program here.