Pettenaro’s holiday project provides fresh perspective

            Christopher Pettenaro, a senior and second-year student at Culver, often had heard his parents, Paul and Linda, describe the good fortune associated with growing up in a safe, peaceful community such as his hometown of Carmel, Indiana.

            It wasn’t until this past holiday season, however, that Pettenaro truly grasped just how fortunate he was.

As his required senior class service-learning project at The Academies, Pettenaro chose to do a food drive in his neighborhood of Windemere.

After handing out fliers around the neighborhood and choosing to donate the collected food to Wheeler Mission Ministries in downtown Indianapolis, he and Wheeler Mission Head of Volunteer Services Cathy Rohrer decided the best date to deliver was Nov. 26. Pettenaro was unprepared for the emotions he encountered while helping hand out the bags of food and toiletries at the mission.

“This was a very humbling experience and I felt like I had not done enough,” Pettenaro said. “To see people in that mission without enough money to even buy their children clothes brought a whole new meaning to what my parents were telling me about being fortunate. Later that day I took a tour of the mission and was thoroughly impressed at the condition of the building. Everything was clean, up-to-date, and all of the volunteers were very friendly. The best feeling was leaving there knowing I had made a difference, that the food I had collected would make someone’s Christmas all the merrier.”

            Pettenaro’s positive feelings are exactly the results program coordinator Bonnie Herzog hoped for when The Academies made the community service projects a requirement for graduation.

“This project makes students think longer and deeper about how and why they are serving the community, as opposed to other states I know of with community service requirements that just wanted the students to be involved for the sake of being involved,” said Herzog, a senior instructor in history and Culver’s Center for Leadership, who spent 18 years in Florida running student governments and community service projects at public high schools before coming to Culver last fall.

Culver’s Center for Leadership curriculum now requires every Culver senior to design and implement a service-learning project, either as an individual or as part of a group, at some point during the year.  The experience is meant to be a capstone of the four-year leadership curriculum, a culmination of classroom lessons and leadership experiences provided during the student’s Culver career.  The planning and implementation phases must total no fewer than 40 hours, and a part of the requirement is to review and report on the success of the endeavor.  Interesting experiences will be posted on the website as students meet success with this new requirement.