Helping end the school year on a fun note, this year Giving The Edge Foundation supported five field days for schools in Queen Anne’s: Matapeake Middle and Elementary, Bayside Elementary, Kent Island Elementary, and Centreville Middle School.
The Foundation’s Director of Operations, Colleen Williams, M.Ed, said they were able to facilitate 24 activities for 2,300 students and deliver 1,800 shirts. Helping make it all possible were 41 volunteers — 36 of those were Kent Island and Queen Anne’s High School students.
“Like many events, you have a company sponsor T-shirts,” Williams said, “So instead of slapping a company’s logo on the back of the T-shirts we decided to have a more meaningful impact and partner with Not My Child QAC 2.0 whose mission is to support opioid awareness and prevention activities in Queen Anne’s County and provide assistance to individuals recovering and families who have lost a loved one. We see the importance of spreading awareness to our youth and merging this orange meets purple feeling,” said Williams. With orange representing The Edge’s mission and purple the signature color of the opioid awareness and prevention campaign, through the T-shirts donated, kids were able to come together as a class or grade and decorate their shirts by tie-dying them — a beautiful blend of colors — symbolic of unity and community.
“Giving the Edge Foundation has been crucial to our success this year at Matapeake Elementary School,” said Luke Ensor, physical education teacher at MES. “In a time when community partnerships are more critical than ever, The Edge stepped up to engage and work with our students. The looks in our students’ eyes when interacting with the volunteers was priceless.” Ensor said, as an educator, he could not thank the Foundation enough for their efforts to keep the students engaged in positive and meaningful ways. Williams said they were incredibly grateful for all the volunteers who stepped up. On one day they had three schools to support simultaneously. “It was truly a heartwarming moment as I’m running from school to school and all the students and staff are representing our T-shirts, kids are laughing, having fun, and staff are continuously telling me how amazing the activities and our staff are. "I was also reminded that many of these kids had never experienced the magic of field day and for those who had before it had been three years (due to the pandemic) since their last field day. It’s crazy to be reminded of what impact the last few years has had on our youth, socially, and emotionally but during field day everyone was able to live in the moment and just have fun.”
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