Prep Talk

Prep Senior Honored for Volunteer Service

Posted February 28th, 2012

 

The judges of the 2012 Prudential Spirit of Community Awards recently conferred a Certificate of Excellence on Prep senior Dillon Josephsen, from Northfield, in recognition of his volunteer activities to improve his local community.  In addition, Dillon has received the President’s Volunteer Service Award, which recognizes Americans who have volunteered significant amounts of their time to serve their communities.  This award was accompanied by a letter of congratulations from President Barack Obama.

Over the past few years, Dillon has initiated two special programs to assist elementary school children in Atlantic City.  Dillon launched The Give Me 5 program to collect like-new and gently used children’s books for the students attending the Texas Avenue School in Atlantic City. The goal of the project was to generate enough reading material so that these predominantly immigrant students could start at-home libraries.  Through social media, networking, and the generosity of his peers at St. Augustine Prep, Dillon collected almost 1,500 books in year one; nearly 4,000 in year two.  Crayon Recycling for Atlantic City Kids, (C.R.A.C.K.) Me Up is a project Dillon started as his Caritas project.  At the end of the 2010 school year, he sought out local teachers and requested that they donate used and broken crayons to his organization.  The crayons were sorted by color, melted down, and re-poured into new crayons.  The recycled crayons were then molded into fun character-like shapes and distributed to inner-city school children.

Congratulations, Dillon!