Sawyer Strasberg ’22, Talia Tepper ’22 and Lily Saada ’22 hosted an on-campus book drive with Community Council on Feb. 20. They partnered with Wise Readers to Leaders, an organization that helps low-income families have access to higher education through reading. Strasberg, Tepper and Saada volunteer with the group and organized the drive.

Strasberg, Tepper and Saada worked with Community Council and Wise Readers to Leaders to organize the drive.

“[Tepper], [Strasberg] and I all volunteer with an organization called Wise Readers to Leaders which aims to help close the learning gap for students from low-income communities,” Saada said. “We know that they have been especially affected by the pandemic so we wanted to do as much as we can to help them keep learning and reading.”

During on-school events, Community Council helps various charities by facilitating drives for their causes. Although Strasberg is not a Community Council member, he said he really enjoyed helping out his friends for a good cause.

“The book drive is an awesome way to help kids with fewer resources to have access to higher level literature,” Strasberg said. “It’s also really good to show Harvard-Westlake students how easy it is to help out kids with less resources.”

Community Council works to teach students about how simple service can be and the importance of helping others. Their website emphasizes that their students are still working to create these activities and opportunities in the school community in new, COVID-19 safe ways.

Tepper and Saada spoke about the goals and outcomes of the event.

Tepper shared that the Community Council strives to shine light on new causes and bring them to the school community’s attention.

“I hope this event was received by the school well,” Tepper said. “Like all Community Council events, we wanted to support other communities in experiencing all of the opportunities which they deserve.”

The team counted 250 books, and Saada said she was surprised and grateful for the high turnout.

“I’m super happy with how it went,” Saada said. “We weren’t expecting to get so many books. I hope we can do more book drives in the future.”