Lakeside School

Zinda Foster was the service learning coordinator before me at Lakeside, and she was the heart and soul of the program. She passed away two years ago. She meant so much to me, and I miss her dearly. Her legacy and impact are hard to put into words—not only on the Service Learning Program, which she really shaped and brought so much thought and care to, but also her impact on the Lakeside community. When I was a student, she made me feel so seen and valued. I would spend most of my free periods sitting in her office—probably on the very same couches students sit on when they meet with me. There were dozens of students who felt the same way during the nearly two decades that Zinda oversaw the Service Learning Program, probably hundreds.

Zinda was the kind of person who wouldn’t let you get away with living below your potential. She could see the best in people and would encourage students to live up to the goodness she could see in them. She brought an indescribable warmth to the campus—and to my life personally. Even after I graduated, whenever I returned to visit, her office was one of my first stops on campus. She brought a values-driven approach to her work. In the same way, she held students to high standards, she also viewed service learning as something that should have a meaningful impact on students and the local community, not just a box to check in order to graduate. By getting students out of their personal networks and comfort zones, she truly brought both the service and the learning into service learning.

When I was in 8th grade, Zinda recruited me to participate in a monthly after-school service learning trip to YouthCare’s Orion Center in downtown Seattle. The iconic neon green building, equipped with a commercial kitchen, provides drop-in services for homeless youth. A group of five or six of us would plan a meal, budget it out, buy groceries, and cook and serve it to kids our age. I remember walking into the massive kitchen hauling our bags of groceries and being taken aback by the warmth of the staff and their obvious dedication to the work they did. They knew the names of every kid who came into the center. I wanted to be as kind-hearted as they were. Before those service learning trips, I knew there were kids my age who did not have a home, but it was only a theoretical reality. Taking a step outside of my own experience and being a guest in the Orion Center space allowed me to learn a lot.

After I graduated from Lakeside, I had the opportunity to spend a year before college living with a homestay family in Senegal. I was drawn to this opportunity after having participated in Global Service Learning in Senegal and was eager for more ways to learn outside of a classroom setting. It was in this year that I began to build awareness of my own cultural lens, experience a taste of what it means to live in community, and realize that good intentions don’t always translate to good impact. When a friend of my host family often offered to buy me snacks at the corner store, I politely declined—I didn’t want anyone spending money on my behalf. But it wasn’t until I had spent several days reflecting on this interaction that I realized I hadn’t been polite at all. In a culture built on hospitality, it’s a joy to be able to give, and I had deprived my host neighbors of an opportunity for reciprocity. This was tough. It was hard to admit that I knew a lot less than I thought I did, but this realization ended up being critical to my growth and understanding of what it means to be a good community member.

I came to internalize some of the lessons that Zinda taught: that community isn’t something that can be learned in a classroom or read in a book. It’s a messy, complicated, humbling, and challenging process that requires vulnerability and a willingness to have challenged what you thought you knew.

In college, I dedicated myself to studying cultural anthropology with a minor in race and ethnic studies, which led me to new experiences of challenging what I thought I knew. In college, an experiential education provided me with the most important learning opportunities. I regularly visited a friend of a local rabbi in the area he and my school occupied. The stories he shared forever shaped the way I made sense of the place I lived. I visited prisons and jails within my school’s town, meeting people who were incarcerated but still participating members of our community. I was struck by the desire of the people I met in prison to contribute positively, spending hours mending broken materials to refurbish bicycles for local children.

My answer to the question “What does it mean to be a good community member?” was formulated by building relationships across boundaries I wouldn’t have thought to cross. The more I sought an answer to this question, the more I was pressed to expand my understanding of who was in my community to begin with. This journey started while I was a student at Lakeside, continued in Senegal, and was supported by the work I did in college and later. It transformed who I was, who I thought I would be, and the role I believe we have in shaping the communities we’re part of. Ultimately, it brought me back to Lakeside to take on the role of service learning coordinator and weave this learning into the program that launched me.

Over the past two years, I’ve sought to bring a community-centric approach to the Service Learning Program. In the same way that my experiences led me to seek answers for what it means to be a good community member and allowed my assumptions to be challenged, I hope that the experiences students have in this new iteration of the program will lead them to similar questions and new understandings.

One of the things I’ve intentionally incorporated in the program is opportunities for students to reflect on the inherent power dynamics within the concept of service and to consciously engage with its complexity. For me, this hearkens back to the moments in Senegal where I realized that just because my intentions were good did not necessarily mean that my impact would be good, too. Though service is often thought of as something one-directional that flows from a place of privilege toward someone who is thought to be “in need,” over time I hope that students’ understanding of service itself is turned upside-down.

Our program is at its best when students find themselves in places not of power or authority to make decisions about a community, but of showing up, recognizing that they have a lot to learn, and vulnerably leaning into that invitation. When students, before even beginning service, learn the ways that a community will meet its own needs and commit to following the cues, wisdom, and directives of community members, we can truly seek to work alongside our neighbors in partnership. I want students to get into the community and meet people. I want their assumptions about service to be challenged. And for them to have a deeper, more holistic sense of the place where they live and their place in it.

Ultimately, though, real relationship building leads to this happening, and I’m proud to see students engage deeply with this work.