As I walked across the grassy field at Anacostia Park, my shoes instantly became covered in dead grass remains from the lawn mower’s job the day before. My feet sinking through the grass, I noticed children playing soccer on the field in front of me, and volunteers like myself dotted the outskirts of the field ready to take on the next team for their assigned activity. All of volunteers expressed their eagerness to be there that Saturday morning with smiles and cheering despite the 90 degree humid weather.
A month ago, I, along with seven other PYXERA Global employees, took part in the 20th Annual DC SCORES Jamboree at Anacostia Park in Washington, D.C. As part of our annual PYXERA Global service day, we dedicated our Saturday to supporting this important community initiative through a day of soccer, field games, and team-building activities. Each year, the DC SCORES’ Jamboree brings together children from 45 DC public and charter schools to celebrate the end of the spring season for the city’s largest after-school program.
DC SCORES, a division of the national nonprofit America SCORES, is an after-school program combining soccer, poetry and spoken word, and service-learning five days a week, 24 weeks of the year for the fall and spring. During their fall session, 1,500 children practice writing and performance skills as a creative outlet, culminating in an annual DC SCORES Poetry Slam. For the spring session, students work with their teams formed from the soccer and poetry portions of the program to research an issue prevalent in their community. Then, the children participate in a service-learning opportunity to address the issue. This spring, because they noticed the problematic amount of trash in their community, the Truesdell Trojans middle school implemented a trash pick-up competition at the nearby elementary school. The soccer portion of the program runs in both the fall and spring, and is the only consistent public soccer league for both elementary and middle school youth in the District.
The designer of program structure, Julie Kennedy, designed this unique combination of activities in 1994 when she worked as a teacher at the Marie Reed Learning Center in Adams Morgan. After school, she noticed that a group of girls had little to do and began working with them. Through her work with the girls, Julie learned that the team-centered relationships developed on the soccer field translated well into service-learning projects creating community leaders, and poetry workshops. These activities helped the students become change-agents within their communities.
Over the course of the day, we interacted with several different teams to help build up their collaboration and comfort with each other. We noticed that these teams demonstrated similarities to our organizational culture and mission. DC SCORES also aims to help DC’s youth become aware of issues within their own communities, and develops a team-like atmosphere within each community that it services. We likened these activities to our day-to-day work: building relationships and helping others serve their or other international communities.
While we still may not be experts at soccer or hula-hooping, PYXERA Global’s work aligns well with DC SCORES. Every day, PYXERA Global employees work to encourage and develop partnerships that help solve issues around the world, often through service-learning programs. This time though, the collaboration and service-learning opportunity presented itself in our own back yard—for our community and our own team. In supporting this local organization and their mission, we hope to encourage the development of values that are critical to our own organization’s success: a commitment to service, communication, teamwork, leadership development, and always, lots and lots of fun.
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