We Did #Big.

Our favorite kind of work around Stone never comes from the top down — it comes from passionate and creative students and teachers who feel deeply moved to do more. That’s what we mean when we talk about “building metaphorical canoes”, that’s what we mean when we say '‘everything is curricular”, that’s what we mean when we say we bias toward yes.

Back in November, one of our Pioneer students — Maxwell D’ — pitched exactly that kind of idea. Or, part of an idea, anyway.

Maxwell came to us with a feeling that he wanted to wrap-up his career year at Stone by — his words — “creating impact and celebrating impact”. And to be honest, that’s kind of all he knew back in November. So he did what we all do here at Stone — he began pitching, and he used the feedback he received to iterate, test, prototype, and redesign. He pitched to the Senior Admin team, he pitched to the Board of Trustees, he pitched up at Rock Lititz, he pitched to three dozen potential sponsors, he pitched to anyone who would listen about this idea he had to “create impact and celebrate impact”.

The first pitch wasn’t necessarily…compelling. But here at Stone we believe in the necessity of failing incredibly well and failing incredibly fast. As he grew into the work and incorporated feedback, he began to understand deeply his “why” and his “what” (combat climate change; create a platform to spotlight local climate work); he tightened his problem statement and his value proposition; he understood more clearly the enormous scope and scale of the project; he understood deeply the volume of support he would need and the very real risks and rewards inherent to his work.

And that, by the way, is exactly why we believe that everything our students do should have a real world outcome. As it turns out, when work is “real” and “authentic”, the rewards are very real. And the risks are too.

Within two months, Maxwell built a governing board for the project comprised of entrepreneurs and educators and philanthropists and Live Event professionals; he worked with Manheim Township supervisors and talent agents in California and porta-potty delivery companies and venture capitalists and security specialists and insurance agents; he assembled teams of students and parents and collaborators in charge of tree wrangling and volunteer wrangling and even “talent wrangling”.

And in March, after months of pitching, feedback, reflection, collaboration, and intensive organization development, we launched The Big Do: a 100% student-lead two-pronged project designed to — yep — create impact and celebrate impact.

By planting 5000 trees in the Conestoga Watershed in 60 days, and throwing an enormous music festival at Penn Cinema featuring The Districts, Big Boy Brass, Brad Armstrong, The Nielsen Family Band, and Stone’s very own Bus.

How about that for a senior project?

Today, we hope you’ll enjoy photographs from the festival and the plantings, and this wonderful video featuring Maxwell himself discussing his commitment to community and to change.

And we hope you’ll more deeply understand what we mean when we say: here at Stone, we do big.