It was a simple government class assignment: attend a city council meeting in order to better understand the workings of local government. For three Newton Senior High School seniors, however, the meeting spurred something even greater: NHS’s Community Cardinals.

“The council was talking about how to ‘renew Newton,’ and we were sitting at a table, and we came up with the idea of Community Cardinals to get our school involved,” co-founder Stevi Eggers explained. “There’s not a lot these days for teenagers to do here, and they needed a lot of volunteers, so I thought maybe if we got 50 kids from our school to help, that’s 100 extra hands that we could use, so we decided that we’d do community service projects from our school.”

After getting the project approved by the school and sponsored by teachers Lori Gilmore, Brian Cleveland and Jodi Morgan-Peters, Eggers, along with senior co-founders Amanda Richtsmeier and Micaela Sciarrotta, knew the next step was attracting students