Hello, friends and fellow neighbors.
And thank you for joining us wherever you may be.
As always, I'm calling the bias and joining me today is Christopher Coley.
He is a teacher
at Franklin Regional Middle School in Western P A and he
has gone above and beyond is his service as a teacher.
He is also the founder and executive director of a nonprofit
in the Western P A area called Serving Other Souls,
which he will tell you more about.
But first off Mr Cawley,
thank you so much for taking some time out of your night to be with us.
Well,
thank you for having me, sir.
All right. So, uh
so do you think you can maybe start off by telling us
about the mission of uh serving other souls?
Yeah.
Uh In the spring of 2011,
we
um happened to have two events that happened in the spring of 2011, the tsunami
in Japan
and a tornado in Hempfield.
And they happened within two weeks of each other.
And I looked around
at the landscape where I taught in terms of my kids
and noticed that not a lot of the kids really were even
noticing that these types of terrible things were happening
and therefore, didn't feel really
the need to try and fix it or help in any way, shape or form.
So we created a multiple day event at the school where I teach Franklin
where I took 50 kids over two days, 25 on one day and 25 on the second day
to the Westmoreland or no to. Yeah, the Westmoreland County um Salvation Army
in Greensburg.
And we worked on the hurricane, not the hurricane.
The tornado relief packaging that was going on to
help the families that were affected by the tornado.
And while that was going on, the kids back at school were doing uh
Origami paper cranes and doing um
calligraphy in the Japanese uh languaging
uh writing about things of like faith, hope and love.
And they were reading uh books
about these um
origami cranes.
The story of the Origami cranes is if,
if someone makes 1000 origami cranes that a wish will be granted.
So a company in Seattle
in 2011 said, hey,
anybody who sends us these paper cranes will donate a dollar per paper crane
towards the um mission relief over in the tsunami areas of Japan that were affected.
So we had these kids doing all these different service projects,
both off site of school and at school.
And when they were done,
we pulled the kids and asked them what they thought of the event. And
we had 100 and two kids in the whole castle house that by, by the way,
your brother was a member of that house a long time ago
and he was a member of S OS. So that's cool that we get to make this connection.
Um,
we pulled the kids and asked them what they thought of the experience
and
99% of them had never done any service work in their life at all.
And of the
uh
those who were polled,
we asked how many of them enjoyed their work and they unilaterally loved it.
So that summer
God really talked to me and he just said, you know,
you gotta do something and
you got these kids who want to do work,
but nobody has created something that does that.
So the mission of S OS is twofold a
to
train kids to be servant leaders
through events that we create.
And then let those events that we create, serve the needy in any way, shape or form,
whether it's a fire
that burned down the house, whether it's a Thanksgiving food drive,
whether it's clothing
for the needy uh for, for the homeless,
whether it's going to the Ronald mcdonald house and making meals for the family,
staying at the Ronald mcdonald House, whether it's
doing a five K for families that have cancer
in some form or fashion,
all these different events that we do
train kids to be servant leaders and help the needy. At the same time.
Overall, what do you think the biggest impact that serving other souls has had
on the students who have participated
over the years?
Great question.
I think two things. One,
it teaches them leadership skills,
organizational skills,
interpersonal skills
and empathy the most and on the back of our shirts. So I'm wearing one of the S Os shirts
and on the back of the shirt. I don't know if you can see it. It says
you have got, you got empathy, which is back in the day, there was a famous slogan,
Got Milk.
And that was, that was about the time that our S OS organization was built.
And one of the kids said, hey, why don't we put the slogan? Got empathy
with a question mark because
empathy is one of the
most important things that a human being
can have. But so many lack it
and it is not something that's intrinsic.
It's something that's built by experience
and service
and very few organizations build events
to infuse that in kids
and parents can do that with their own individual families. But
to my knowledge, there aren't very many organizations like S OS that,
that, that's our mission.
So I, I think all of those things, leadership organization,
but most important and empathetic soul.
Now you do have a event coming up and it's something that you guys have been doing.
It's the uh mouse for SM
walk but all.
But um due to the COVID-19 pandemic,
you guys have to do it a little differently this year.
And
um you um
tell us about how you're about how you're gonna be doing it um differently this year.
Due to the,
this year, we're doing our first virtual five K slash one mile walk slash
bike ride. So typically we do
an event on, on Memorial Day every year and we draw anywhere from 700 to 1000 people
and they'll show up and
pay anywhere from 15 to $30 for registration
and then come and we have basket raffles and all of these things.
And it's like a Chinese
like we, we have a Chinese uh
um
auction, we have tree shrub sales, we do all of these different things.
It's kind of like a carnival
and it's just like a big emotional hug for those families.
And then multiple weeks later, we hand them nice checks
that help them with the cancer that they're fighting
this year.
There's no event.
Everyone's just gonna go out and either walk,
run or bike on their own at their own time.
Several of the groups are gonna get together at pre
established places.
We'll advertise that to the people who have registered
if they want to go join those people.
But we,
because of COVID restrictions,
we can't have hundreds of people together at the same time.
So um
people have already paid
and they'll just mingle wherever they mingle
and then they'll, they'll send us the pictures afterwards.
And the emotional hug will be kind of a collage
that we put together and send to the families.
That is a reflection of those people walking, running or biking on behalf of them.
And then a few weeks later, we'll meet again and give out the money like we always do.
So it's a, an emotional hug b a financial hug.
And this year it's just different. That emotional hug will come in
a
um
a Google form or a Google document that I put together that
just as pictures and music and stuff instead of a live event.
Ok. Well, it really does seem like you guys are really making the most out of this.
So what has been the reaction um for um
all of this with the people who are participating,
people are pretty excited about it. It's way different.
I mean, our numbers are significantly lower because COVID is what it is.
And a lot of people still are kind of hesitant to
jump into events like this because they just don't understand the
um
logistics of it.
But
the people I've talked to are very thankful
that they can still do something because a
lot of people have been sitting around not doing a lot for this last 456 months.
And it's just nice to be able to do something for
somebody else because that's the first thing people will think like,
well, ok, I, I'll bring you a meal, I'll, I'll watch your kids.
I will
walk your dog or whatever it is.
So an event like this is a way that a,
you get to show other people that
I care about this person,
but b you get to physically do something and that is tangible. Humans need to show
compassion through action
and not a lot of people have the opportunity to do that sometimes and
they forget how good they are
and how good it feels to be doing that type of stuff
until they do it because we make ourselves so busy anymore.