Determination Resilience Encouragement Ambition Motivation

D.R.E.A.M club was created a few years ago to be an African-American student based club that was used to encourage other minority students at Wando and volunteer the students time to better their community.

One of the members, Barinwa Wiwuga, was impacted greatly by joining this club.

“I was walking with some friends who were involved with D.R.E.A.M and they told me about the clubs purpose of helping other students” Barinwa said.

The club is known for having a smaller group of students that plan events for the less fortunate.
¨I get to enjoy volunteering and doing good things for other people while being around my friends¨ Barinwa said.

The meetings are held at 8 a.m. every Wednesday in the school library.

The members of the club make it a point to plan new events at every meeting.

Past events have included a can drive and a toy collection that was given to churches, and group members spoke at Laing Middle School to students about high school life.

During Black History Month, many of the club members are participating in reciting poems and different parts of Martin Luther King Jr.´s ¨I Have a Dream” speech.

Santana Grove, another general member, sang a song in the Black History Month assembly and Barinwa Wiwuga made a speech.

Not only does the club give their time and effort to give back to their community,, but their goals are to motivate the students and shrink the racial divide between student success.

¨Our plan for the club is to motivate other minority students to step up and do better in school because there is a large divide in this school,” Barinwa said.

The advisor, Shirley Verma, tells the students about all the upcoming volunteer events and they chose which to participate in.

Many of the members are also involved in FLOW, which is a student-to-student mentoring program founded at Wando to help fix the disparity between the African-American students achievement and the rest of the Wando population.