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In 2017, RMG decided to celebrate its 30th anniversary by giving back to the community its employees and clients live and work in–Baltimore City. We partnered with Business Volunteers Maryland to find a Baltimore City Public School in need, and were paired with Harlem Park Elementary Middle School. The school is located in the Sandtown neighborhood, just blocks from where the Freddie Gray riots occurred a few short years ago. 30 volunteers spent a day in late October at the school working on several large projects:
- Reorganizing the IEP Office, where our incredible volunteers cleared out space for the IEP teacher to effectively meet with students to go over their individualized plans. This transformation was extraordinary.
- Creating Space for a Parent Room, where students’ parents could come to apply for jobs, do research, access the internet, or simply wait for their children to be done with class; we were able to clear out the room, and eventually furnish it as well.
- Working in the school’s library to create leveled classroom libraries; volunteers pored over thousands of donated books and labeled them according to the reading level they corresponded with. This way, the teachers could easily grab the correct books to assign to children reading at various levels.
- Painting a beautiful mural of the school’s crest and mission statement at the entryway to the school; this hallway was otherwise fairly drab but is where the school children enter each day and it looked much better with brighter colors.
- Redesigning content book rooms to make sure that reading specialists could easily find the correct books to assign to children in various grades.
- Holding a donation drive at the firm, for both those attending and who could not attend the day of service; RMG was able to donate 20 coats, 15 pairs of tights, about 3 dozen hats, 2 dozen pairs of gloves and about a half dozen scarves to the school children who badly needed them for the winter months.
Our volunteers did not expect to be able to effect such a vast change in just one day, but the progress made was truly amazing. After the day of service ended, RMG has continued to help Harlem Park by donating furniture to furnish the parent room and IEP rooms, donating warm clothes and supplies to the school, and working to continue the relationship with the school by pursuing future days of service and volunteer opportunities.
Check out the RMG Impact Report – Harlem Park by clicking here!
