HEART OF GOLD

Isabella Baaki wanted to do something that would warm the hearts of her fellow Notre Dame-Bishop Gibbons School students as well as the faculty.
In fact, Baaki has been planning a heart-warming gesture since last year before the pandemic got in the way in March.

“Right before the shutdown happened, I had thought of a plan to do a birthday club where every student would have their lockers decorated on their birthdays,” said the NDBG senior, “because some kids do get them decorated by their friends but a lot of times people don’t and I didn’t want people to feel left out.”

Even though that idea got shelved, Baaki remained resolute in her plan — and with a little help from her mom — found Hershey’s Heartwarming Project Action Grant, which grants $250 to kids and teens to build empathy and connection in their communities.

“My family loves Hershey Park and my mom usually tries to plan a trip for it and she saw (the grant). I had to fill out some questions about what I would use the grant for and how would I do it,” said Baaki, who applied for the grant last fall. “I wrote I wanted to make everybody feel special and appreciated because right now everyone is so isolated and it is easy to feel lonely and forgotten and unloved. I really wanted to make sure that I could do something to make them feel loved and valued.”

Instead of the birthday club, Baaki thought of a new idea using cut-out valentines and Hershey’s very own chocolate bars.

“I had to think of something that would allow me to make every student feel special without breaking any social distancing or COVID rules,” Baaki said. “So I thought that if I could do a little note and a piece of chocolate on everybody’s lockers — the chocolate was already wrapped, it was safe to do that — it would work perfectly, so that is what I wrote about on the grant.”

She received the grant in mid-January but didn’t get the money until after Valentine’s Day so she decided to bring her love to the students on Feb. 22, the day they returned from winter break. She started cutting out the paper hearts — around 250 and writing messages on them such as ‘Your smile lights up the room’ — but would need an “accomplice” to get more supplies and affix the chocolates and hearts to the lockers. Enter Mickie Baldwin, the school’s director of development, who has known Baaki for six years.

“We went to BJ’s (Wholesale Club) because we wanted to maximize the grant and purchased the Hershey bars. Bella also had made separate valentines for the faculty, so we got separate candy for the faculty to make goodie bags for them,” Baldwin said.

So on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 17, Baaki and Baldwin got to work and, for the better part of five hours, started decorating the lockers.

“We had a master list of all the lockers … so Bella just directed me to where she wanted me to be and we did an assembly line,” Baldwin said. “Bella definitely had a plan in place. She wanted to spread out the messages. We didn’t look in the lockers and say, ‘This is John Smith and we want him to get this message,’ but she definitely had a method. She didn’t want all the messages to be all clumped together. So she sorted them out and there was color coordination. I was just the driver and the keys.”

When the students returned, they were understandably overjoyed by the gesture.

“Originally nobody knew that I was the one who did it,” Baaki said. “So when I walked into school I was listening to what they were saying, I overheard a lot of people saying, ‘This is so nice’ and ‘Look, we have chocolate.’ There was a lot of excitement and it brought me a lot of joy because I knew I had done it but they didn’t.”

Baldwin said students and teachers were “ecstatic.”

“She had put a valentine and a goodie bag in each faculty members’ mailbox and my cell phone started exploding (with people asking), ‘Oh my gosh, do you know who did this?’ and ‘This is so awesome I can’t believe this happened.’ ” Baldwin said. “And we even had a new teacher who was starting that Monday and we didn’t know where they were going to put her mailbox, so Bella made sure that everything was secured to her classroom door so when she went to her classroom it was there.”

Baldwin said during the afternoon announcements she explained to the students and faculty that Baaki was the one with the heart of gold.

“She is a gentle and generous giver. She is never going to be someone who says, ‘Hey, look at me I did this.’ But she has the most generous heart and is the most gentle, loving person I know. She is so talented in so many ways,” said Baldwin of Baaki, who is at the top of her senior class and also an accomplished ballet dancer and works with Northeast Ballet Company. “She is the first to volunteer for a project and has always been a generous heart to represent our school.”