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02/04/2019 11:00 PMThree years ago, after asking her parents about the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), a organization they regularly supported, Kearney Capuano took the initiative to learn more. She went to UNICEF’s website and read stories about the work it was doing around the world to help children in need, provide educational opportunities, and advocate for children’s rights.
“Their website led to links to individuals who have these crazy stories of having no food, living through war,” Capuano said. “It was making me feel guilty. I live in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. It’s a privileged town. I felt I had to do something.
“I kept asking my parents to donate more and more [money to UNICEF] and my mom said, ‘Why don’t you create a club at school where the whole school can help out?’” Capuano said.
Some kids might have shrugged that suggestion off. Capuano got to work. Then a freshman at Old Saybrook High School (OSHS), she researched what she’d need to do to establish a UNICEF club at her school.
“I had go on a series of calls and e-mails with national UNICEF leaders. They walked me through exactly what I’m doing and how to teach the kids and how to do fundraisers,” she said. “I approached a few of my friends I thought could fill roles. As soon as they were on board, I needed to get an advisor.
“That was one of the scariest parts—I had to ask a teacher to give up a lot of time to help me,” she said.
Spanish teacher Amy Claffey agreed to oversee the club.
“UNICEF has always kind of been a part of [Capuano’s] life in some way,” Claffey said. “Her family’s very active. So to bring UNICEF to Old Saybrook was completely Kearney’s brainchild. She approached me all on her own and said that she wanted to start the chapter at the high school and she had all these ideas for it and the plan to roll it out.”
Capuano then made an appointment with the principal to make a case for establishing the club.
“I had to present my reasoning and what I planned to do for the coming years,” she explained.
How intimidating was it to approach adults with her ideas?
“The in-person stuff was scarier,” Capuano said. “Over the phone and emails with the national leaders were less scary because they were obviously helping me out and they were just teaching me what to do.”
At first, Capunao said, it was difficult to drum up interest among fellow students.
“In Old Saybrook among other schools, it’s hard for kids to understand what’s going on in other parts of the world because we have it so easy,” she said. “They didn’t know what it was or didn’t think it was necessary to help.”
Capuano spoke to students about world problems like the global hunger crisis and the war in Yemen and why help is so desperately needed. Soon she began hearing students discussing these issues in the hallway.
“Once that spread, then more people were interested,” she said.
The club meets once a month and each meeting has an educational component to it.
“A really cool thing that UNICEF does is each month they have a theme: March is world water month, April is world immunization month,” Capuano said. “I’ll bring up the theme [at the club’s meeting]: October was the War in Yemen. I give a mini-lesson about that crisis. During that month, if you do a fundraiser, the money goes to that issue.”
UNICEF provides clubs with comprehensive information that is “accurate and up-to-date,” Claffey said. “Kearney does a really nice job on taking out what we want to focus on and getting that information to the group.”
That information is “something that [the students] wouldn’t necessarily be getting in their high school curriculum,” Claffey continued. “It helps to kind of break down the walls of Old Saybrook and see what is going on throughout the world. And it focuses on children, so there’s the component of recognizing, ‘Maybe my life would look very different if I weren’t in Old Saybrook.’”
The club, which Capuano said has “around 30 strong members,” with a few people trickling in and out, meets more frequently when they’re planning a fundraiser, such as its dodgeball tournament, or other event. So far, the club has raised around $1,500 for UNICEF, Claffey says, and 100 percent of that money is sent to the organization.
Capuano has spoken at Old Saybrook Middle School to a large group of students in the auditorium about the club and the work UNICEF does. The club also sets up a table each year at the middle school as part of a showcase of high-school clubs for incoming freshmen.
“Every year we do a few fundraisers at Old Saybrook Park & Recreation for the middle school” students, Capuano said. “We’ve had cookie decorating and an ice cream social and as they come through we talk about UNICEF.”
The club is now discussing opportunities to speak to schools outside Old Saybrook, although this might not come to fruition until Capuano graduates. Her sister, Katie Capuano, currently a freshman at OSHS, will continue to be active in the club and Claffey will remain its advisor.
This fall, Kearney Capuano will be attending Georgetown University. She plans to major in global health, with a minor in disability studies and neuroscience.
“My ideal career path would be to work with special-needs kids in developing nations,” she said. “A mix of what UNICEF does and global health and neuroscience. I want to work on programs for the disabled and making ways for kids with special needs to be happy.”
“I’ve had her [in Spanish class] for three years and she’s definitely ready for the next phase of life,” Claffey said. “But she’s always known how to vision and has been very committed and concentrated. She’s amazing.”
For the moment, Capuano and the other members of the club are planning a student open-mic fundraiser in OSHS’s cafeteria, which has been newly renovated in a coffee-house style.
“Old Saybrook is a tiny bubble. My family has been lucky enough to travel to other parts of the world, to developing nations,” Capuano said—she and her family have visited Morocco, Panama, and Thailand. “That’s really changed my view of things.
“We have so much here and there’s so much to give others,” she said.