WAM Theatre Works With Miss Hall’s School’s Horizons Program

Barby, Kristen, and Maggie in the WAM Theatre Office
Barby, Kristen, and Maggie

This fall, WAM Theatre embarked on a new adventure when we took on an intern through the Horizons program at Miss Hall’s School (MHS). Horizons is an innovative experiential, service-learning and internship program that provides MHS students with opportunities to volunteer and intern at Berkshire area social service and cultural organizations, businesses, and professional offices. The program partners with more than 75 different organizations, and students, in turn, provide more than 12,000 hours of volunteer service each year to the community.

On Thursday mornings, all sophomore, junior, and senior girls travel for their Horizons experiences. Maggie, a senior from New Hampshire, set to graduate in 2015, comes to the WAM Theatre offices.

“We are delighted to have Maggie as our first MHS Horizons intern,” said WAM Theatre Artistic Director Kristen van Ginhoven, who has worked most closely with Maggie. “It’s a great fit to have someone from MHS working with WAM Theatre. As a team that works remotely a lot, it’s been great to have our ‘Thursdays with Maggie’ as an anchor to get us all into the office. We get a lot done together on those days, and have some great conversations also!”

No stranger to theater, having performed in two MHS Theater Ensemble productions, Maggie volunteered during junior year Horizons at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington. She joins all her interests in Theatre while being an intern at WAM Theatre.

“I’ve been doing something different each week,” says Maggie, whose assignments this fall have centered on the Company’s November production of “In Darfur,” and have ranged from helping to edit bios for the creative team to collecting details for a fact sheet on Darfur, to helping with the show’s set. “I’ve really gotten to see what it’s like to be putting on this production, because this is a real, grassroots organization, and I’ve been able to try a lot of things and see all of the different elements of the organization.”

As a senior, Maggie will collaborate with Kristen to design her senior project helping with WAM’s major gift program, which she will complete in the spring.

In a time when there is international focus on providing safe access to education for women and girls, Miss Hall’s School has been a solid example of the American model for more than 200 years. Founded in 1800 by Mira Hinsdale Hall’s great aunt, the forerunner of what became MHS was the first girls’ boarding school established in Massachusetts and the first attempt to provide advanced education for young women in the city of Pittsfield. MHS has chosen to date its founding from 1898, when Miss Hall began her forty-year leadership and brought the School to the forefront of women’s independent secondary education.

A Horizons Blog about Maggie’s work at WAM Theatre

http://misshalls-horizons.org/news/news-updates-pitching-raising-awareness/

MHS Website

http://www.misshalls.org/

MHS Horizons Website

http://misshalls-horizons.org/