Community Service

Each week ACS students experience a range of sites and ventures, depending upon our Pottstown partners’ needs. They might include:

• Tutoring and playing with children in the afterschool programs at the Ricketts Center, Centro Cultural Latinos Unidos, or Better Tomorrows at Rolling Hills.
• Packing and distributing food to families experiencing food insecurity through the Pottstown Cluster of Religious Communities or the YWCA.
• Helping the Children’s Discovery Center museum prepare new exhibitions.
• Assisting with sorting and staging clothing at the YWCA’s Youth Dignity Closet.
• Learning merchandising skills at a small, minority and woman-owned consignment shop in downtown Pottstown.
• Maintaining one of several community gardens.

Our flexible weekly schedule also accommodates occasional calls from area organizations seeking helpful Hill student hands.  Past requests have included setting up for events at the local senior citizens center or continuing care community; creating holiday decorations for shut-ins through ArtFusion, a Pottstown education arts nonprofit; sorting and displaying used books for a sale at the Pottstown Regional Public Library; or painting flats at Steel River Playhouse. From time to time, ACS students contribute to weekend or evening projects, such as preparing packages for the international Feed My Starving Children organization; neighborhood cleanup; or pitching in at Pottstown-community wide beautification days at Historic Edgewood Cemetery or the Veterans’ Memorial at a Pottstown Park.

Service and service-learning opportunities also are offered through Hill’s academic and residential program.  Recent examples include:

• An upper form English class helped local elementary children build reading skills in collaboration with the STRIVE Initiative youth mentoring program.
• Hill’s Quadrivium Scholars conducted research at a pollinator garden created by the Hearts of Humanity Community Development Corp.
• A dance student worked with her teacher and classmates to visit an assisted living facility and a senior center to perform various forms of dance and lead movement exercises.
• Students in Hill’s “Performing Arts With a Cause” often visit area schools, nursing homes, and other organizations to provide musical entertainment.
• Religious Studies students have toured a local cemetery with its historian as part of the “Death and Dying” class.
• Studio art students have worked alongside community members to restore a street mural during the Week Without Violence commemoration, as well as to glaze pottery bowls used as a fundraiser for Pottstown’s ArtFusion arts education nonprofit and, through the woodworking class, create holiday decorations for High Street planters.
• Student photographers from The Hill News (newspaper) and The Dial (yearbook) staffs have documented various cleanups and events.

• Select students also have the opportunity to attend an annual, four-day community service and engagement-focused Closeup Foundation / National Association of Independent Schools Student Civic Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C. 

A variety of student organizations serve others, whether through hands-on projects or fundraising efforts. A few examples:

• The Student Philanthropy Council solicits grant applications from Pottstown-area nonprofits then determines how to distribute approximately $30,000 each year in funds provided by a generous alumnus and his family.
• The Pottstown CARES Club is comprised of students from Hill and Pottstown Senior High School who collaborate to address various local causes, from food and housing related charities to an annual “Go Green and Go Home” clothing and household item donation drive benefitting numerous area agencies.
• The Sustainability Club participates in activities throughout the year, from cleanups and community garden assistance to organizing campus collection points for “flexible plastics" and partnering with Hill's Information and Technology Services department to recycle electronic waste.
• Students have started organizations such as the Disability Awareness Club and various animal-related clubs as well as several health and wellness awareness and fundraising drives.
• The Hill Knit and Crochet Club created warm hats and scarves for donation to the local shelter for the unhoused.
• Student co-chairs lead Hill community participation in Pottstown’s Coldest Night of the Year fundraiser supporting a Pottstown shelter for unhoused individuals.
• Prefects led a dormitory food collection drive for Operation 143.
• While not tied to a club or organization, Hill students as well as faculty, staff, and families are consistently generous in contributing “Angel Tree” holiday gifts to children attending the Ricketts Center afterschool program.
• Through Hobart’s Run, the School community hosts a variety of collection drives throughout the year, ranging from Thanksgiving dinner nonperishable goods for area food pantries, to diapers and baby care products for a local diaper bank for parents in need.