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Giving Back: Small town, big hearts
By Lisa Traiger
Maryland dance students learn a vital step: Volunteering
 Nestled in the mountains of Western Maryland, Frostburg is a
bucolic small town, movieset perfect with its
early-20th-century homes, an old-fashioned Main Street
dotted with family-run businesses, and the renovated Palace
Theatre, once a nickelodeon and now the town's community
auditorium. A college town that surges when Frostburg State
University students arrive in late summer, Frostburg is a
can-do place. A band of volunteers dug its swimming pool, by
hand. The first library, too, was a joint effort supported
by a community-organized curbside book collection. So it
comes as little surprise that the Frostburg Dance Academy
has made a mark with its special brand of volunteer
activism.
Amy Griffith grew up at the Frostburg Dance Academy,
starting tap and ballet under the tutelage of its founder,
Shirley Sigler, in 1970. Fifteen years ago Griffith bought
the business from her teacher and has watched it grow to 150
students. Today she offers a cadre of classes in the basics,
tap and ballet, plus lyrical, hip-hop, jazz, modern dance,
pom, and modeling. Many of the dancers that the 38-year-old
Griffith, a Frostburg native and FSU graduate, has taught
now study in university dance departments, teach, or run
their own studios. With teacher Jaime McGreevy, she provides
her students with a firm foundation that has gained them
spots at national competitions and performances at Walt
Disney World, DC's national Cherry Blossom Parade, Boscov's
Thanksgiving Day parade in Philadelphia, and more. But the
accolades and ribbons are less important to Griffith than
making a difference by serving her community.
Educating Our Youth Through Volunteerism is Griffith's baby.
Over the years she has created a series of opportunities to
bring her dancers--as young as 3 and up to parents and
grandparents, some of whom stop in for their own weekly
classes--into the greater Frostburg area to raise funds for
nonprofit organizations. While the dancers gain experience
and the studio reaps greater visibility, Griffith is more
interested in the impact she makes in serving the
community's needs.
"I'm very big into volunteerism and patriotism," the school
owner explains. "Each spring I do a patriotic [recital]
finale using a mixture of patriotic songs and red, white,
and blue." Several years ago she realized that parents were
spending a substantial amount of money on recital costumes
that their children wore only once. Griffith decided that
she could take classes of students to nursing homes and
public schools to give free performances, which got extra
wear out of the costumes but also gave something to the
underserved seniors in group living situations and children
who don't receive a thorough arts education in their public
schools. Word spread, and soon the dance school began
getting requests to perform in the annual Allegheny County
Arts in the Schools program, and nursing homes and
assisted-living centers clamored to get on FDA's performance
calendar.
"The older folks loved [it] when the little kids came to do
shows for them," Griffith says. That led to Operation
Stocking Stuffer: Students contribute small stuffed animals,
soft cookies, and other doodads to fill holiday stockings
for the elderly. After the students dance they meet the
residents and present them with the stockings. "That not
only gives the kids the chance to put their dances on in
another dimension, but it also gives them a sense of how
other people live and an appreciation [for what they have],"
says Lisa Bohrer, mother of two, including 13-year-old
Maddie, who dances at FDA. "Amy realized that there was a
lot of opportunity for the kids to do a lot of good in the
community," notes Bohrer, who works for a healthcare network
in nearby Cumberland, MD. Although Operation Stocking
Stuffer has become an annual project, Bohrer says that some
students visit the nursing homes on their own because they
get so much out of it.
It has been nearly three years since Griffith decided to
expand the community- service component of FDA. Still aching
from the events of September 11, Griffith chose music that
focused on patriotism and pulling the country together for
the following spring's recital. Then, as the five-year
anniversary of the disaster neared, she proposed a
fund-raising dance concert to support a planned memorial to
victims of the Shanksville, PA, crash site of United Flight
93. With their parents' support, the students who chose to
participate spent the summer rehearsing, organizing
fund-raisers like yard sales, and contacting members of the
community for contributions.
"These kids really did work together, giving up their
summer, having fund-raisers constantly, and they didn't
complain a bit," says Bohrer. "It made them pull together--and the extra dance helps them, too."
"I realized
that my daughter was getting so much more out of being in
dance class than just learning about dance. She was learning
how to be a good citizen and how to give back to others,"
adds Kathy Shippee, of Mount Savage, MD, about her
14-year-old daughter, Katie. Griffith had instituted a
student committee, which enabled the youthful participants
to brainstorm and organize some of the fund-raising
activities. Shippee, a nursing home manager, took it a step
further, setting up a meeting for the committee with members
of the local chamber of commerce and the city council.
The meeting offered an unexpected bonus for the students:
the chance to learn about public speaking. Maddie Bohrer,
13, was co-chair of the children's fund-raising committee
this past year. "When I went to the city council and got to
make a speech," she says, "it was very different for me . .
. to talk to really important people in the community." Shippee points out that the girls spoke in their own words
before these prominent local leaders. Katie Shippee
co-chaired the student committee in 2006 and was pleasantly
surprised when a few business leaders contributed on the
spot.
Altogether, during that first year FDA raised about $10,000,
including in-kind use of a community college's auditorium.
More than $5,000 went directly to the fund for the Flight 93
Shanksville memorial. When the students and their families
drove to Shanksville to present the check, Griffith reports,
they received appreciative thanks from the victims' family
members, including one father who noted that his late
daughter had been a dancer herself. During the past year
Griffith focused her fund-raising efforts closer to home.
She selected the regional Family Crisis Resource Center in
Cumberland, MD, which serves women and children affected by
domestic violence, and with her students raised more than
$11,000 for its programs.
Marion Russ, who has watched two daughters dance through
FDA's programs, says that these extracurricular
community-service performances are "great because they show
the girls what they can do in the community, how they can help--how their interest in dance can be taken outside of the
recital or the studio and used to raise money." Russ'
13-year-old, Michelle, enjoys ballet, tap, jazz, hip-hop,
and just about anything the school offers. Russ was
particularly impressed by the eye-opening experience that
fundraising for the crisis center offered her daughters. "I
think," she reflects, "the girls initially didn't understand
what it was really about." They went all out that summer,
selling water bottles and flags during a Fourth of July
parade, organizing yard sales and raffles, meeting with
business leaders, and more. But they were mystified when
they were told that they couldn't promote the shelter's
location. That is, Russ explains, until the dancers were
invited for a tour.
"The experience was very enlightening. I could tell by the
questions my daughter and the other girls asked that they
were beginning to understand . . . that though the place was
very nice, it really wasn't home." The experience at the
crisis center opened the primarily middle-school- age
dancers' eyes to issues of domestic violence in a subtle yet
specific way. Both kids and parents seem pleased with the
experience, which the parents regarded as a teachable
moment, not an encroachment on their daughters' innocence.
Community service and volunteerism have become as important
for Griffith as teaching her students to keep their heels
down after landing a jump. She estimates that about 90
percent of her dancers and their families participate in at
least one volunteer effort during the year. And if they don't, for any reason, that's OK with Griffith. She hasn't
seen any attrition related to these outreach efforts and, in
fact, many parents and students value the additional
opportunities to perform. But even more, they come to
appreciate the importance of giving back to the community.
Griffith lays out her beliefs clearly in her studio's
promotional materials: "At Frostburg Dance Academy, we have
always believed that instilling humility and respect through
volunteerism . . .was of utmost importance. Educating Our
Youth Through Volunteerism is a group comprised of local
youth artists, family members, and friends who all share the
same dream and passion: to pay it forward." Maddie Bohrer
takes a kid's-eye view of why she keeps volunteering: "I'm
really glad I got to be a part of this. I like the feeling
that Amy and our parents teach us that we should always put
others before ourselves."
After fund-raising for a memorial to the victims of the
crash of Flight 93 on 9/11, the dancers and their parents
traveled to the site of Shanaksville, PA, where a temporary
memorial stood.
Photo by Commercial Video
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