Graville T. Woods Elementary

Changemaker School
Illustration of buildings depicting an organization

Granville T. Woods strives to give students a sense of agency and empowerment while enabling them to spark that capacity in their family members and neighbors. Granville T. Woods achieves this through its work with Peace First, which allows all children in the school to learn peacemaking skills and launch their own peacemaking project. Information center specialist and librarian Cleo Jarvis helped students start another agency-instilling initiative at the school: The Philanthropy Roundtable. During the 2011-2012 school year, this student group raised $800 by collecting pennies. They then surveyed the student body about the issues students cared about the most and researched organizations that address those issues. The Roundtable then interviewed the organizations they identified and decided how much of the $800 to distribute to each. This effort led the Roundtable to be named the “New Yorkers of the Year” by New York One.