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03/01/2017 07:30 AMMadison is blessed with many longtime volunteers, but few of them can say they’ve made it all the way from kindergarten to high school.
Maribel Friend first started volunteering at her daughter Alyssa’s kindergarten field days. That was followed by stints as PTO president at Island Avenue Elementary School, Brown Middle School, and Polson Middle School.
And now she’s serving as co-chair of Nite in Hand, the annual overnight party held at Daniel Hand High School for graduating seniors. In 2016, her first year as co-chair, Maribel helped run Nite in Hand for Alyssa’s class.
This year she’ll be co-chair for the graduation of her second daughter, Brianna, and if all goes according to plan, Maribel will continue in the role until the graduation of her youngest child, Teddy, in 2019.
That’s a four-year commitment to a job that stretches each year from September to June—putting Nite in Hand together involves much more than just hiring a DJ and filling a punch bowl—but Maribel says the work is worth it.
“Our mission is to keep the town and our graduating seniors safe,” she says. “Statistically there are a lot of fatalities on graduation nights, in small towns especially.”
Running from 10 p.m. on graduation night until sunrise the next day, Nite in Hand is a substance-free party that keeps the seniors off the road and under supervision. Maribel emphasizes that the night is mostly about showing the kids a good time.
Volunteers decorate the school elaborately—last year’s theme was New York City—and provide all-night food, games, and entertainment. (Hoping to surprise the seniors, Maribel won’t divulge this year’s theme or specific activities.)
While the visual transformation of the school is impressive, what’s most striking for the kids, Maribel says, is “the experience of being able to kind of just have fun with the classmates in the school that they go to every day, because it’s a stressful place for them every day.”
The night is a respite from not only academic pressure, but also social pressure. Almost everyone in the class attends, Maribel says, and there’s “no cliques, no groups—everybody’s just doing their thing.
“We have activities for them,” she says, “so they’re kind of engaged, so you don’t really have to worry about, like, ‘Ooh, is that person talking to me?’ All of that goes away.”
Since no cell phones or cameras are allowed, kids also don’t have to worry about how they’re going to look on Instagram the next day.
One student, Maribel says, said that Nite in Hand was the most memorable experience she had in high school. Many Hand graduates, including Maribel’s daughter Alyssa, have said they want to come back and work on this year’s celebration.
“Those kids have gone through it, saw how wonderful it is, and now want to give back,” Maribel says. “That’s what I want to create, too, that continuity, like ‘This is my community. They did this for me. Let me give back.’”
Like many volunteers in a leadership role, Maribel stresses that her project is a group effort.
“I think last year we had about 450 volunteers, involved from the beginning to the end,” she says.
She shares credit with her co-chairs—this year’s is Joanne Combs, who also has a daughter graduating from Hand in June—and with Michele Freund and Ann Lefler, who are in charge this year of the main fundraiser for the event, the senior auction.
Open to the public, the auction will be held on the evening of Friday, April 28. Seniors offer a day of service to the highest bidder. Also up for sale are goods and experiences donated by local businesses and artists.
Maribel encourages parents to volunteer at the high school on the night of the event, even if their kids think they’re going to embarrass them.
“We’re behind the scenes,” she says. “It’s a big school. There’s no interaction unless they want to.”
Maribel says that being there for Alyssa’s Nite in Hand “just kind of made graduation even more special, seeing how happy my daughter and her friends were.”
For more information or volunteering, Maribel can be reached at mcfriend@comcast.net.
Beyond Nite
Maribel has contributed her time to more than just the PTO and Nite in Hand. She was a coach for Madison Youth Cheerleading and has served on the booster committees for Hand cheerleading and the school’s show choir, VIBE. She was also on the founding board of the Madison-based charity Call to Care Uganda.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, when she met her husband, Robert, 21 years ago, it was through community service.
Maribel, whose parents were born in the Dominican Republic, was living in Manhattan, where she had grown up and attended Catholic elementary schools and high school. She even went to college in Manhattan, at Pace University, where she earned a degree in accounting.
Maribel was working as a CPA for PricewaterhouseCoopers. Robert, meanwhile, was living in Madison but was running a major volunteer project in Manhattan: the weekend-long renovation and rehabilitation of a public grammar school in Chinatown. The couple got to know each other when Maribel was promoted to a leadership position at the last minute.
“I was kind of like ‘Oh, my God, this guy is amazing,’” she says. “But I thought he was married. I was thinking he was too good to not be married.”
When Maribel found out Robert was single, she persuaded him and a group of his friends to go out to a restaurant when their work was done on Saturday.
“I just made sure I sat next to him, strategically,” she says.
The couple chose to live in Madison.
“I noticed that he was more of an open-space person,” Maribel says. “Even though he enjoyed New York, it’s not second nature to him like it is to me.”
Maribel has kept her job while raising the family; she commuted between Madison and New York for a number of years. She currently works in Stamford, where she’s in the internal-audits department at the Royal Bank of Scotland.
She says that one of the reasons she joined the PTO was to show that mothers with full-time jobs could contribute.
Moreover, she says, “I felt that having parents involved really kind of enhances and enriches their children’s lives.”
That said, she’s aware that volunteering can cut into family time.
“The parenting comes first,” she says.
Maribel hopes to expand her service work when her children have all moved out, and she plans to keep working on Nite in Hand.
“I’m committed to the volunteers,” she says. “I figure if they helped me out while my kids are graduating, I’m happy to help them when their kids graduate.”
Robert, who works in sales and business consulting for Patron Technology, also volunteers. Among other roles, he’s an assistant district governor for the Rotary, a trustee of Emerson College in Boston, and a board member of the Shoreline Arts Alliance.
Maribel says that she and Robert encourage their children to donate their time.
“We wanted to teach them this: You have to give back, because you have so much. You have to give back because you have to make a difference.”
The children seem to have listened. For example, Alyssa, who is a freshman at the University of South Carolina, is involved in the student government.
“She’s created a mentoring program,” Maribel says, “where if you’re a freshman, she’s going to match you up with an upperclassman to transition you during the first few months when you’re at college.”
Maribel would encourage everyone to volunteer.
“It will just bring so much happiness into your life,” she says. “You’d be surprised that it may seem like work, but when you start doing it, you realize it changes the person you are, and the more you do it, the more you enjoy it because it just brings so much joy that other parts can’t.
“You know,” she says, “sometimes you enjoy your job, you enjoy your family, you enjoy your friends, but there’s just something about giving to others that…that feeling you get…There are no words to express that.”
To nominate a Person of the Week, contact Tom Conroy at t.conroy@Zip06.com.