Last month I returned to my elementary school. It’s been years since I’ve visited, and I was impressed to see the new carpets, lockers, and front desk. However I wasn’t there to see the building, or even to visit my former teachers (which was a real treat); I was there to train a group of 7th graders at the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston to be volunteers at the Perkins school in South Boston through a partnership between GBJCL and TELEM. To see the full article, click on the article title.

This blog post is dedicated to the memory of Mr. Lee Shulman, who volunteered for the past 14 years with GBJCL (nearly as long as our program’s existence) until he passed away this fall. To see the full article, click on the article title.

At GBJCL, we are delighted to find that a number of our volunteers are retirees returning to their lifelong profession. Recently, I received an email from my now retired fourth grade teacher, Susan Bloom, welcoming me as GBJCL’s new program coordinator. “That's one of the things I miss most from my teaching days,” she wrote to me about her time helping students at the Potter Road School during writing time. And she isn’t the only one. To see the full article, click on the article title.

The entire Winship Elementary School community strengthened their partnership with Temple Beth Zion’s GBJLC volunteer tutor team. This winter, two dozen tutors and their families got together to build something the school longed for- a library. Volunteers collected over 600 books to donate to the school. After years of limited resources, the school finally had the space and staff for a library, and the tutor team responded enthusiastically to the call for action! To read the rest of this article from January 2011, click on the title above.