As a sophomore, Lina Liakakos started Delivering Hope, a service club at Langley High School devoted to serving the community by helping those less fortunate within the Northern Virginia area. Most of the club’s work to date has been focused on service projects with homeless shelters, clothing centers, and clothing drives for those in need. In a year and a half, the club has grown to include more than 80 members. The club is structured as a joint effort requiring coordinated work by all the members and officers including herself as president, a secretary, an operations coordinator, and a public outreach coordinator. Contact with the outside community is through an Instagram social media account: Deliveringhope.langley.
Lina says that she was first motivated to start the club by the memory of her elementary school experience when she became friends with kids in her class who lived in a trailer park near her neighborhood. At a young age, she saw that not everyone had the same economic advantages as her family, and yet the friends she made were just like her. Seeing poverty so close to her own home made a deep impression on Lina. When she was in the 6th grade, her family moved to a more affluent area, but she never forgot her earlier experience, and she observed poverty near her new community that was less visible. During the remainder of her grammar school years, she participated in her church’s support for the local homeless shelter.
In her sophomore year at Langley, Lina reached out to the Loudoun County Homeless Shelter to ask what their residents needed. Acting on the response, she spread the word within the school community, and via social media raised 400 dollars to purchase socks and underwear for the shelter. That successful project inspired Lina to found Delivering Hope as a club primarily dedicated to serving homeless people.
In 2023, students in the club helped prepare and serve a pre-Thanksgiving meal for 45 clients of the shelter. Lina believes it is important for students to personally meet those less fortunate than themselves. “We need to have a face-to-face connection to humanize and connect with people less fortunate than us. You never know what is going to happen to the person you are helping. You never know what led them there to begin with.” She notes that many students don’t have other opportunities to make these connections, but when they do, the experience has a strong impact. The students who have participated in the service activities make a significant effort, often requiring them to drive close to an hour on a Saturday morning for each project.
In November 2023, club members volunteered at Luckett’s Community Closet, a resource providing free clothes for people in need. Students met and talked with mothers looking for baby clothing as well as with elderly people looking for winter clothing.
One of the club’s goals for the next several years is to establish relationships with homeless shelters and food pantries located near Langley High School. Lina also wants to ensure the continued longevity of the club by mentoring officers so that there will be a wide and experienced bench of student officers when she graduates from Langley in 2025. Therefore, she will not take an officer position in her senior year but will support other students preparing them to take the lead.