ACTIVITIES
Volunteering & Community
Ohana is an active participant in volunteer and community building events in disaster affected areas such as Tohoku and Tibet, and poverty affected areas such as Cambodia in Southeast Asia.
TOHOKU
Ohana International School in Tokyo’s commitment to helping people in the tsunami ravaged areas of Japan is unending. Many friends and families of our Tokyo preschool have visited the area and participated in volunteer clean up and other work, such as our recent collaboration with Place to Grow in Minami Sanriku. We are going to be continuing our collecting and volunteer work for many years. We want to thank those who have participated in these trips so far and look forward to doing much more during the next school year.
CAMBODIA
Early in 2011, Ohana International School in Tokyo Director, Shelley Sacks, spent time volunteering in Cambodia. Caring for others is a regular topic of discussion among the children and teachers at our Tokyo preschool, and this was a great opportunity for Shelley to “walk the talk” and bring back a wealth of experiences to share with the Ohana community.
Ohana International School, together with the Minato-ku ward office, started this project about 4 years ago.
Going to the park is our daily activity and our school thought about how to look after our park more. We have contacted the Minato ward office about what we wanted to do and they introduced several options that we could choose from in order to help the community. As caring citizens of Minato, they suggested that we could do some volunteer work to make our neighbors happy and the environment a lot cleaner. It could be like picking up the trash on the street, planting flowers at the park or safeguarding a public place. Our school chose to do the planting and they gave us the opportunity to have this project.
We’ve been creating our garden in the park since we started Ohana International School. First, in Amishiro Koen which was close to our first location and now in Step Park. We also participated in an incentive for Tohoku through the ward office by planting sunflower seeds which grew into flowers that were sent to Tohoku in order to create field of sunflowers as they absorb radiation.
So from now, we clean and plant new seasonal flowers on our garden twice or three times a year. Our children love to help watering and cleaning our beautiful Ohana garden.
Please see our blog for updates and to learn more about current Ohana specific volunteering and community building activities.