Grade 8 Gives Up Graduation Party To Give A Homeless Girl A Room

Beautiful halls, extravagant dinners, dazzling dresses and shiny limos—that is not how Molly Field and her classmates are celebrating their grade eight graduation this summer. The girls at the Joan of Arc Academy in Ottawa have given up their party to sponsor a room for a homeless girl at Ottawa’s Young Women’s Emergency Shelter. “What made me tear up is having the girls give up something they’ve been watching for ten years,” says their teacher Connie Springfield. Every year students at the Academy come together to do charitable work. Their grade eight runs a Girls 4 Girls club that contributes to charitable projects for young women around the city. This year Molly’s class has been working hard to raise $3,500 to give a homeless girl at the young women’s shelter a room to live in for a year. “The girls decide how to do it, it’s their leadership thing, I just facilitate it,” said Springfield. The 17 girls managed to raise $1,039 from bake sales—something extremely hard to do for such young girls, Springfield explained. Meanwhile, the graduation celebration would have cost them around $2,000. “Molly felt sick about how much they would spend on one evening in two hours,” said Springfield. So within a couple of hours, Molly put together a presentation for her classmates with different options. At the end of it the decision was unanimous: The girls all agreed to have a simple graduation potluck and contribute the graduation money towards the room at the shelter. “We have many nice things coming for us in the future and it would be nice to give something to the girls [at the shelter],” Molly said. “We help [the shelter] in other ways, like Christmas stockings, but this has never happened. This is from them. They’ve given up their graduation celebration,” Springfield said. The girls’ parents were quick to support their ideas. They told Springfield, “If these girls are our future adults––we’re okay.”