Celebration of Y12 Citizenship in Relation to the SJS Shaper Profile

The spirit and impact of our School Citizenship attribute has been celebrated by our students in Year 12. The following year 12 students were nominated by their peers as having demonstrated citizenship and compassion at a local and global level.

We would like to highlight the nominees:

Madalena Carneiro is extremely passionate about gender equality. Following surveys sent to our local community, she found the results to be disturbing in relation to the inequality in the shared domestic duties of couples who both work. She has studied the gender index of the EU and found that these results are representative of Portugal. Madalena decided that she would use her computer skills and her desire for change by designing an app that would help couples become more aware of sharing their time equally. The app works by both parties discussing and setting up their domestic workload and the time taken for each chore. The app then graphs this information and allows visualisation of any imbalance. Once a fair routine is put into practice and established the couple then can delete the app.

Madalena also volunteers on a weekly basis with Centro Comunitário da Paróquia de Carcavelos to organise the weekly market of donated merchandise. She recently participated in the sponsored run 'He for She' which also was to raise awareness and provide resources for gender equality, and she volunteers with AMI, which provides medical help.

Sophia Costa de Sousa writes to express herself using poetry which is then posted on Instagram as audio poetry. She has deep compassion for those people who find it hard to express themselves.

Sophia is quoted as saying, "sometimes it's really hard to tell someone how you feel when they ask you if you're okay, even if the question is asked sincerely. There's always the thought that it would be too much to share or the fear that you don't know how to. I've recently created an Instagram account, @Sophiapoetry8, in which I have begun to post my poems publicly, hoping that it helps someone else going through something or simply just reading".

We share below an example of one of Sophia's poems:

I want to create a piece of art 
Where the detail doesn’t bother me 
Because everything is delicately placed
And the words flow like it’s some magical race.
But an artist will always doubt the end result
only because they want it to have meaning.

I want to create a piece of art that’s not a sculpture 
Something you can’t hold or touch but where the beauty of it is still real. 
Maybe the insipid little detail we call perfection Is overrated; 
If everyone is doing what everyone does 
Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the game?

I wish everything could be turned into poetry 
But then the mind lingers
And the thought stops.

So when you do make that piece of art, 
it becomes worthwhile because you know you worked really hard. 

Lara Sheehy is an extremely passionate and vocal individual about issues that she feels are unfair. She is an active member of the Diversity and Inclusion working party, which has regular meetings to take action against inequality in school. Lara and her CAS group, including Carolina Mendoça and Olivia Harris, are planning a project to raise awareness and raise funds for charity. Lara is editor and illustrator for the school newspaper, and this allows her involvement in interviewing, writing and publishing articles that allow others to think about and reflect upon important issues related to diversity and inclusion.

 
Joanne Stedman
Head of Year 12