Junior Catherine Jiang and Senior Elie MacAdams have each created their own method of public outreach

Auggie Petit held a packet of papers in his hand, antici­pating his time to shine. When it came around, he did not hold back.“Gold. Gold. Wonderful Gold!” Petit bellowed in a voice that did not match his age. “Whenever I see it, I never feel old!” He marched around the classroom. Fellow classmates surrounded him, clutching onto scripts for the Greek play: King Midas and the Golden Touch.

Discere Aude, or “Dare to Learn” in Latin, is a non-profit organization created by junior Catherine Jiang. Its goal? To give underprivileged students the opportunity to learn Latin, increase their vocabulary, and instill in them a mindset of fol­lowing their dreams.

Discere Aude became an of­ficial nonprofit organization on March 14 of this year. After researching Dallas community schools that do not offer Latin as a language course, Jiang stumbled upon Lumin Linds­ley Park Community School in East Dallas. It was there that Ji­ang taught three classes to kids aged 6 to 9-years-old, exposing them to the Latin language and Greek culture. She even gave them Latin names based off of their english names. Jiang recalls a parent reporting that their child even started ad­dressing her parents by “pater” and “mater,” the Latin terms for “father” and “mother.”

According to Jiang, “60 per­cent of English words have Latin roots; that’s really im­portant to learn vocabulary.” According to Jiang, learning Latin could make for an easi­er time in learning other Ro­mance Languages like Span­ish, French and Italian because they all have the similar Latin roots. It could also prove use­ful in teaching English literary and rhetorical devices. Tom Loew, School Director for Lu­min Lindsley Park, weighed in on the importance of Latin. “I took four years of Latin in high school,” he said. “That training affects my comprehension of language almost every day of my life.”

Jiang said that her sopho­more year was when she start­ed to love Latin. The idea came to her, in fact, during a Latin competition. “The night I had the idea, I spent the entire night working on it because I was so excited,” Jiang said. “I don’t even know where it came from.”

As far as community out­reach is concerned, Jiang hopes to gain support mainly from Hockaday students.

“This year, I am starting a community service club where club members can help design the curriculum and come up with games for next summer,” Jiang said.

As she hopes to expand the non-profit, she admits that she needs all the help she can get.

“I am hoping to reach out to the Hockaday community for girls who have learned Latin to go and teach and gain this ex­perience.” Jiang said, “I learned a lot from it, [and] I hope they can as well.”

Loew expressed his desire for the Discere Aude courses to integrate into Lumin Lind­sley. “My best case scenario is that this course become part of the summer culture at Lumin,” he said. “Parents and students look forward to the course of­ferings, and we hit the ‘sweet spot’ in enrollment – not too few, not too many.”

Passion clearly runs throughout this organization.

“I want to keep this going for a while,” Jiang said. “Maybe for the rest of my life!”

Jiang shared her hope of ex­panding to many more schools in the area and eventually around the country “so that ev­eryone has a chance, an oppor­tunity.”

To learn more about Discere Aude and its mission, please visit http://cjiang.wix.com/dis­cereaude.

Jiang is not the only Hocka­day student trying to help the community.

Senior Elie MacAdams launched her social enterprise company, Choose Something Good, on Sept. 1. She ran it as a blog for a year, but then decided to take it to next level: making it official. The website serves as a meeting point for potential community service volunteers and smaller non-profits in the Dallas area.

“I’m trying to find the [non­profits] that aren’t as well known, that need the volun­teers, and don’t have as much funding,” MacAdams said.

Each non-profit must pay a monthly fee to be advertised on the website. Already, eight or­ganizations, including Opera­tion Kindness, Back on My Feet and Discere Aude, can be found on Choose Something Good.

In 2011, MacAdams attended a leadership camp and was as­signed with the task to come up with an action project to better the community. “I thought of this as a [broader] way to con­nect people and share nonprof­its’ stories,” MacAdams said. “Also, high school volunteers tend to volunteer at places where they end up standing around a lot of the time.”

What really sets Choose Something Good apart from other volunteer sites is the op­portunity to take a personal­ity quiz. Users can answer a few questions about themselves and how they would behave in different scenarios, which eventually matches them to the nonprofit that best fits their in­terests. Whether you like run­ning, animal work, education, or crisis prevention, you are guar­anteed to be paired with a com­patible organization. MacAdams explained that her goal for the website is to facilitate a relation­ship between a non-proft and its volunteers, claiming that there is not much of one.

X2Vol currently serves as Hockaday students’ method of community service sign-up. “Now, we sign up on x2vol; we go wherever,” MacAdams said. “We don’t have this fidelity thing.”

MacAdams hopes to help form a strong association be­tween the organization and the volunteers who truly connect with it.

As far as expansion goes, MacAdams hopes to reach out to many more Dallas-area non­profits. She has created an In­stagram and Facebook page to promote the company as well as magnets and business cards.

“Right now, I am running off of my own funds,” MacAdams said. “I want to make T-shirts, which is why I need people to donate.”

Funds will go towards ex­panding the website into a shopping section where Mac­Adams plans to sell Choose Something Good merchandise as well as products from the organizations that she is part­nered with.

MacAdams encourages the student body to go online, take the personality quiz, and volunteer.

To learn more about Choose Something Good, please visit http://www.choosesomething­good.org/

– Sydney Yonack