Photo courtesy of Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Dallas.
Sylvia Hargrave has spent the past few months turning Friday afternoons into something special for the community she serves.
As a volunteer with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Dallas’s Oak Cliff Club, Hargrave started her time at the organization helping the students with homework. In October, she began implementing a new weekly program called “Friday Fun Day” at the request of some of the students she serves.
“They’re like, ‘We want to have fun.’ And they listed all these random things. ‘We want a chocolate fountain, we want an ice cream machine. We want a girl’s sleepover. We want a boy’s sleepover,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘OK, some of those things, I can accommodate. Some of those I cannot.’ And so that’s kind of how it started.”
The weekly activities range from parties like the first “all treats, no tricks” Halloween party or a Super Bowl party, but other times she focuses on ways to make education fun through hands-on STEM activities.
The Joy of Science, one of the Friday Fun Day activities at the Oak Cliff Club. Photo courtesy of Sylvia Hargrave.
“We did like a little mini science lab where we did four different experiments … so it was the classic make a volcano, where you add vinegar to baking soda. The second one was their color mixing, so that they could learn what happens when you mix red and yellow and yellow and blue, etc,” she said. “And then we did ‘Will it sink, will it float?’ So we had a big, big container of water and we put different objects in there, and then we looked at magnets and what’s magnetic and what’s not magnetic.”
These activities were spread out into four stations and she enlisted the help of other Oak Cliff Club participants.
“What was so nice about that is I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the older kids because the older kids manned each station, and then I kind of floated around and showed kids what they were supposed to do and took pictures,” she said.
The STEM-focused activities are especially meaningful to Hargrave, who works as chief of ophthalmology at Methodist Medical Center.
“They want to be Instagram famous, and they want to be basketball stars, and it’s much more likely that they’ll be a physician,” she said. “I’m biased because I think what I do is just absolutely wonderful and they can also strive to do those things, but in reality, you need something long term that’s going to kind of accrue that you can enjoy.”
She said that it’s also important to her to show representation of those kinds of careers to the Oak Cliff Club children.
“I felt that it would be good for them to see someone like me. I mean, I’m a Black woman. I have a really nice practice. I feel that I have a really great career, great patients, great life, financial stability,” she said. “I really don’t have much to worry about. And so I think it’s important for them to see all types of people, and I wanted them to see someone like me.”
With construction underway at the Oak Cliff Club, Hargrave has continued volunteering at the Cedar Springs Club temporarily and plans to help run one of the summer camps.
Photo courtesy of Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Dallas.
She said volunteering with children has been as meaningful, if not more important to her, than her medical career.
“The kids are pure and they’re innocent … when you work with children, there’s no ulterior agenda,” she said. “The kids just want to soak up everything that you say, and they want to learn and they want to have a good time, and they make me come out of myself and the seriousness of what I do.”
With this week being National Volunteer Week, Hargrave said her advice to those looking to volunteer is to know you will gain a lot from the experience.
“Well, first of all, you will get more out of it. The kids will give you more than you give them … And I’m an arts and crafts kind of person, and when I look back on those times that I enjoyed so much from my childhood, the fun that I had didn’t occur in a vacuum. There was somebody behind whatever I was doing, making it fun,” she said. “As I’ve gotten older, I need to be that person behind those activities that I enjoyed so much as a child, that someone was doing out of the kindness of their heart to allow me to have fun. Now it’s my turn to be on the flip side of that and do something to make someone or allow someone else to have a good time and have fun.”
