International House Charity Work

International House New York strives to play a positive role in the community and aims to use its expertise in teacher training and English language teaching to help those who can benefit from it.

Educational Donations

Every year International House New York donates $2,500 to a worthy educational cause. The donation is designed to help a school or organization to realize a project that they would otherwise not be able to do. We are especially keen to support programs that benefit the community and involve ESL students.

2010

In 2010, International House and Teaching House New York was excited to support the fertile creativity of history and government students at Kingsbridge International High School who through a combination of learning and inspiration produced an incredible collection of original songs (including the sample below). Tim Ross, the project's organizing teacher at Kingsbridge International High School, described the project in his own words:

Making The Band: Hip-Hop at Kingsbridge

The assistance of Teaching House was vital in the development of “Making The Band: Hip-Hop at Kingsbridge”. As a U.S. History and Government teacher at Kingsbridge International High School, I became inspired to use a creative project to help struggling students at Kingsbridge International with the financial assistance of Teaching House.   

Throughout the year, I noticed that some students who were frequently cutting class or skipping their writing assignments could often be seen writing and performing their own rap music in their free time.  With this in mind, I was intrigued when I found an opportunity to earn an Arts-In-Residence Grant  from the Bronx Council on the Arts to do a creative, attractive project with the students that would support the curricular standards in New York City.  This presented the opportunity to hire teaching artist Latonia Phipps, a talented actor/playwright/teaching artist to design and facilitate a three-month course in writing and producing a rap album and performing the music before a live audience.  Latonia inspired the students to search within themselves to write from their hearts about the topics that affect them.  She used a variety of methods to generate ideas for the music, including freewriting, group collaboration, and journal-writing field trips in a local park.  

The result was that students created quality works of music, even tackling challenging themes such as global politics and domestic violence.  In the end, the students were extremely proud of their debut CD entitled Cambiando El Mundo.  They performed the music on two occasions upon the projects’ completion, much to the delight of their audiences.  

The “Making The Band” project can take credit for improving the attendance of several of the students, as they became excited to participate during the lunch hour meetings.  Thank you to Teaching House for filling a vital gap in the budget for the program.

 

Listen to a track from "Cambiando El Mundo":

 

2009

In 2009, International House New York was proud to support and fund a Fair Trade Project for 11th-grade students in Laura Berson's class at Brooklyn International High School in Brooklyn, NY, which is also an all-ESL public high school.

Fair Trade Project

Though International House New York specializes in English as a Second Language (ESL) education, we also look for ways to support the field of education in general. One of the ways we do this is by investing in New York City's public schools and the teachers who work hard to create projects that will engage and educate the youth of NYC by empowering them and giving them a voice to be heard.

This year we donated $2,500 to Laura Berson's 11th-grade class at Brooklyn International High School - a public high school for ESL students - for her proposal to lead her students in conducting a Fair Trade Fair by researching the economic concepts of international fair trade and presenting their findings to an audience chosen by the students (entrepreneurs, consumers, legislators, etc.). The purpose of the fair was to educate audience members about fair trade and what they can do to support it in their own industries or lines of work.

Many of the students in the classes that Laura teaches come from countries with businesses that benefit from fair trade, so the students were able to explore the connections between their home countries and the international business community through their fair trade research projects. Also, this connected both the curricular goals of Laura's Economics class and her second semester Participation in Government class.

Laura expressed her hope that "by taking action through the culminating Fair Trade Fair, students will realize that they can make a difference and that what they have to say is valuable, a fundamental tenet of democracy."

International House New York was impressed with Laura's project proposal and also her students' hard work, which involved learning English language through higher thinking research projects requiring students to examine their position in the world and argue for it. Students developed their English writing and communication skills through a variety of mediums such as formal writing, oral presentations, video, photography, newsletters, and much more.

The Fair Trade Fair was a huge success in May 2009, involving numerous other New York City public schools other than Brooklyn International High School and was put on at New York University's Kimmel Center. The students were able to raise a substantial amount of money for the causes they had researched and learned a great deal about fair trade business while they improved their English at the same time. Congratulations to Laura Berson and her class at BIHS for putting on a successful Fair Trade Fair!

2008

In 2008, Teaching House New York (IH New York's teacher training department) funded a large-scale oral histories project with Tim Ross' 11th-grade global history class at Kingsbridge International High School, a school in the Bronx, NY which is designed for an all-immigrant, ESL population. The project involved students learning American and global history through studies of documented oral histories while simultaneously planning and conducting interviews with immigrant community members. The students recorded oral histories told by community and family members and transcribed the recordings both in English and their native languages. The result was a published book of oral histories called "Walk In Our Shoes."