Saint Bernardette’s, Jinja

Sacré Coeur, Graz

Sacré Coeur, Graz

Saint Bernardette’s, Jinja photos : Sacré Coeur, Graz and Lolín Menéndez srcj

All the students of the Sacred Heart Community in Graz take on social responsibility as a result of an interesting school project. This school project focuses on two dimensions: first, there is local cooperation with an asylum seeker home in Graz and second, there is a strong connection to the Sacred Heart School in Jinja/ Uganda.

It soon became obvious to everybody at our Sacred Heart Community “that something needed to be done”. Initially Mr. Riegler, a former high-ranking Austrian politician, gave a lecture on the Global Marshall Plan and the Millenium Goals. As a follow-up different workshops took place at our school. They focused on topics such as e.g. hunger as a global issue, migration, information on various developing countries like Brazil  and football, Congo; African drumming… .

Therefore, we all agreed on engaging in a special project. One main point which helped shape it was the idea of personal involvement. Fundraising on its own was not seen as being sufficient; our focus was on personal involvement and commitment.

One idea was to hold a charity run. This school-wide-event was a tremendous success because everybody was involved: either in organising the run, finding sponsors for the run and taking part in the run, providing refreshments for the runners, …

At more or less the same time contact with asylum seekers and their children in Graz was established.

After the run we all felt truly blessed to have contributed towards helping women and children in Graz as well as children in Jinja.

Due to the huge success of and enthusiasm for our project, we continued the work in the academic year 2007/2008. All 23 secondary school classes and some primary school classes have each managed to raise 110 Euro on their own. Our pupils tried to create their own projects (e.g. performing a play) in order to actively contribute towards earning the money instead of just asking for donations. As a result of our pupils’ commitment, creativity, enthusiasm and hard work, 25 pupils- whose parents could not send them to school before- are now able to attend our partner school in Jinja.