The company Chick-fil-A administrates one of America’s largest leadership focused programs for high school students and captivates teenagers looking for learning opportunities.
“The purpose of the program is to help students who have the potential to emerge as leaders but have not quite gotten there yet and teach them how to be a leader among their peers and in overall society. They work with schools in the community and offer this opportunity to students throughout,” facilitator Kristen Fendone said.
The goals of the academy include engaging, exposing, and equipping teenagers with unique ideas and skills, as the academy believes these students are the future leaders of the world.
“I mean, every kid has to go to school and our leaders come from schools. Academies like the Chick-fil-A Leadership Academy are tools that help us learn and grow making us better leaders and helping us function better in a society,” senior and ambassador Isabella Oliveira said.
Due to an existing partnership with Chick-fil-A, FCUS now has the Chick-fil-A Leader Academy, which supplies students with what they see as an impactful project, with the potential for more to come.
“We have a relationship with the Chick-fil-A in Cagan’s Crossing already, they are our business partner for the school. We have been working with them for several years and have a very beneficial relationship for both, their business and the school. In the past, they have gifted us with many things and provided a lot of opportunities to our students. In the name of that relationship, this program was something that they wanted us to work with, ” Fendone stated.
Although the program shares name with the popular food chain, Chick- fil-A’s restaurant is not directly linked to the training itself and the members do not have unmediated contact with the business. However, a few participants share a previous relationship with the firm, acting as employees and continue to trust the values and goals of the business.
“I worked at Chick-fil-A for nine months, so I already have some previous experience with the company, and I do like what they stand for and their values. Besides it is a great opportunity to be able to help other people and do some tasks in school for the community, so I think is a good way to spend my time,” Oliveira said.
With the assistance of supervisors, such as Fendone, the program is managed inside the school and is similar to a club. The key difference is that membership lasts for just one year, as current members will become mentors for future members. Projects concerning community service are being planned for the following months during the scheduled meetings held by the group.
“The program has videos that we show going over different aspects of being a leader and we have different activities and projects that we do in meetings throughout the year. This next month we are going to be doing ‘Do Good December’ where we identify a service project that we can participate in that will benefit the community and then, come January we will create our own service project and implement that to benefit the community as well,” Fendone said.
The club’s first mission took place on the Four Corners lower campus, where teens led a reading for kindergarten students and left notes in children’s books.
“We just recently had a project where we had little children’s book and we wrote little messages for everyone in kindergarten at the lower campus and we went and we read the books to them. So just little things like spending time writing those messages and being around people I really enjoy being around,” Oliveira explained.
More recently, the academy took on a fundraising project. As a goal they had to sell as many sandwiches as possible within the school in order to contribute to a student’s hospital bills.
“The Academy recently did a service project in the Fall to benefit one of the students at lower campus. We did a fund raiser that involved selling Chick-fil-A sandwiches and the proceeds were put towards the student medical bills,” Fendone said.
This mission took place at the upper school where the group worked as a team to effectively deliver sandwich orders to students across campus. The team created a practical system and assigned tasks to avoid any conflict.
“When we first did it [handing out the sandwiches], we hadn’t figured out a concrete system but then we decided to separate it by floors. I would do the eighth-grade hallway, Matthew would take the seventh-grade hallway and Bella did sixth. We then moved upstairs and section off the top floor so we wouldn’t duplicate orders, and we also had an excel sheet that Isabella was in charge of, so she would just highlight the names of people that already got it,” senior Ashley Becke said.
The group is finding more ways to reach the community beyond FCUS through a service project slated for early 2024.
