Andover community service coordinators arrived at Exeter on Saturday to exchange ideas for community service programs with their Exonian counterparts over breakfast. Chad Green, Director of Community Service, said, “Meeting at Andover/Exeter makes sense, since we were all headed there anyways. We went up early and had breakfast. Eight Andover students went up with me, and we met up with about 10 Exeter students.” “The purpose [of the meeting] was to get together and talk shop. The Exeter students had questions about how we do things, and we had questions about how they do things,” Green continued. The coordinators discussed collaborative community service programs. “We could meet in Lawrence and do community service projects together,” said Green. “I thought the meeting was overall fun,” said Mia Pecora ’10, who serves as a Co-Coordinator for ARC, a community service organization at Andover. “I think that the Exeter community service board got probably more out of it than we did, just because our program is a couple years more advanced than theirs.” “One thing I got out of [the meeting] was that it made me really thankful for our program and the resources that are so close by. We have Lawrence just one town over, which is such a big source of community service for us,” she continued. “A lot of the organizations we work with are people from Lawrence, whereas Exeter is in a more rural area and they were saying that they don’t really have an equivalent to Lawrence, so they lack the wide base of community service recipients,” said Pecora. Green said that Andover and Exeter should work together for community service is because “although they’re our arch-rivals, for all of our differences, the basic kind of model is very similar.” “There are similar clubs, but their situation is different, because they have a very rural location, so the nature of what is available to them is kind of different. The fact that Andover neighbors Lawrence has a pretty big impact on our program, because there’s no equivalent to Lawrence in Exeter, so their focus is more on-campus,” Green continued. Another difference in the community service program at Exeter is the organization. “[Exeter’s] program evolved in a very different way. It’s completely student run. This is only their third year of having an adult coordinating and overseeing things,” said Green. According to Green, the meeting between the community service coordinators will become a regular event, due to the success of Saturday’s meeting. “Every few years, we get together with a group of schools and their community service coordinators. The last couple of years, it has been just Exeter and Andover students,” said Green. “There seemed to be some interest at the end of the meeting of continuing the conversation, so we talked about doing the same thing for Andover/Exeter in the winter term,” said Green. For the proposed meeting in the winter, the Exeter community service coordinators will travel to Andover.
