Since the beginning of the pandemic, Ella Marcus ’22 has been committed to decreasing food insecurity. She, with guidance from the Director of the Hiatt Center Liz Latour, has completed a two-term Student-Directed Project on long-term solutions for hunger relief.

“Getting from A to Z definitely was not linear,” she said.

Ella’s initial goal was to organize a food drive, but Ms. Latour knew she could do more.

“I wanted to research the problem and help find solutions tangible to the Beaver community.”

Alongside technologically updating and organizing the Brookline Food Pantry system, Ella designed a curriculum for the sixth grade to increase awareness of Boston food insecurity exacerbated by the pandemic. She helped individualize food orders by calling clients weekly. She developed relationships with them, and eventually rallied 16 Beaver students who spoke multiple languages to call the clients she alone could not.

All it took for me was one day in a food pantry to realize that this was something I cared about, which led to a year of work I passionately took part in.  — Ella Marcus ’22

In June, Ella arranged for Joanna Travis P’23 and Board Chair of the Greater Boston Food Bank and Billy Shore P’23, Executive Chair of No Kid Hungry, to speak to the 6th grade about their work. In addition, she presented at Middle School Meeting about how she worked with the Brookline Food Pantry to create volunteer opportunities for Beaver students, thereby alleviating challenges they faced when needing to more than double their output during the pandemic.

— Lizzie Conklin is an intern at Beaver Country Day School and assistant to painter Joel Janowitz. She is currently interning in various departments at Beaver—including Visual Arts and Marketing. She hopes to one day be an artist.