Emily Popolizio with the Cason Kids Chorus, which sang at what the church dubbed the Intergenerational Love Luncheon. Photos provided
By Janis Fontaine
On Valentine’s Day, more than two dozen children from the youth programs at Cason United Methodist Church in Delray Beach donned red aprons and white gloves to serve a festive lunch to nearly 50 guests.
The sold-out lunch, which filled Fellowship Hall with lively chatter and laughter, raised more than $800 for kids in foster care. Guests filled tables decorated with flowers and handmade party favors. A feast featuring a fruit cup, pasta salad, sandwiches, chips and dessert was served by the young waitstaff.
The event was a cooperative effort of Cason Kids Care, for ages 5-11, and the newer God Squad, for kids 12 and older. Both are led by Emily Popolizio and a team of helpers.
Popolizio, who taught elementary school for 41 years in Massachusetts, established Cason Kids Care five years ago when she saw a void in children’s programming at the church.
“I said, I’ll try something. So I pulled together a group of parents, grandparents and teachers and said, ‘What do you want for your kids?’ What I found out was, no matter where people were on the spectrum of organized religion, they wanted their kids to be decent human beings, to have a sense of moral justice. So, I started a program that addressed those needs.”
Cason Kids Care meets on Saturdays twice a month to learn about people less fortunate. The topic of kids in foster care climaxed with the luncheon.
Cason Kids Care started with nine members and grew to 28 over the next three years. Then, as kids aged out of the first program, Miss Emily started the God Squad, which meets on Sundays, for those older than 12. Cason Kids has 21 regular attendees, and the God Squad has 11 members. Not all of them attend Cason.
Miss Emily has a team of helpers, including sisters Cathy Commagere and Patti Alexander, plus a trio of ladies she can always count on to lend a hand. Betty Crane, Sandi Schmidt and Loreley Hinderling, who also volunteer in the church office, made buckets of pasta salad, carefully following a recipe for uniformity. “We like to help,” Betty said.
Alex Higgs, an eighth-grader at Don Estridge Middle School, is a member of God Squad and a former Cason Kid. He said he likes “that I’m doing something good. I feel bad for the kids who don’t have homes.”
Alex’s sister, Kayla Higgs, is known as “the girl who does everything for everybody.” She supervised Isaac Durr as the young servers took the people’s orders, delivered their drinks and food, and cleared away the dishes when they were done. Isaac was nervous, but he didn’t show it. He deftly delivered cups of sweet tea and lemonade, and Kayla said, “Isaac did a really good job. I was proud of him.”
Popolizio agreed. “I was just so filled with pride for the kids. To me, it’s refreshing to see kids really step up to the plate. A couple of them said, ‘Oh, I’m so nervous,’ but I told them, ‘Jesus is in your back pocket. Just say quickly, Jesus, give me some courage here, and you’ll be able to handle it.’ And they certainly did. They really did such a great job.”
Also stepping up was God Squad member Ciela Caycho, a budding entrepreneur who made the cake pops the kids served for dessert. She embraced the process of dipping molded cake in chocolate, handcrafting and wrapping more than 50 cake pops for the luncheon.
Popolizio, who will be 80 this year, “has so much passion and energy,” Commagere said. “She’s so organized, it’s hard for anything to go wrong.”
Kayla Higgs (in blue), working with Isaac Durr, takes lunch orders from a table with Mable McDonough (left) and Jill Petrille. McDonough, 99, is an icon at Cason UMC. Petrille is her granddaughter.
Teaching tough concepts
Experts say teaching kids principles of kindness and empathy leads to acts of compassion. But it doesn’t happen automatically. It’s tough to teach kids about concepts that, as adults, we don’t understand ourselves. Educator Dr. Jennie Warmouth wrote in an education blog for National Geographic that empathy is “the ability to perceive, understand, and vicariously share in the thoughts, feelings and experiences of another living being.”
Simply put, empathy comes back to that old adage of walking a mile in another man’s shoes.
But we don’t just want kids to acknowledge their feelings, Warmouth said. We want to motivate them to compassionate action, to help another in distress.
“The great news,” Warmouth wrote, “is that empathy can be developed, strengthened, and reinforced throughout our lives.”
Popolizio says, “In the deepest, darkest recess of their hearts, there is a feeling of wanting to be good and wanting to understand and wanting to help. And if you can tap into that, it grows. I think there’s something inside all of us, but it does need to be nurtured and explored and helped and encouraged to grow. That’s the answer, I think.”
Each month, Cason Kids Care has a theme like homelessness or hunger, but this was the first time Popolizio tackled foster care. Each unit has two components: an introduction to the topic the first week and an activity or action that puts that theme into perspective for the second meeting. The Valentine’s Day lunch was the first time Miss Emily’s groups took on such a large project.
To introduce the topic, Popolizio said, “I read books to the kids, and I use video clips and then ask kids what they are feeling or thinking. Sometimes I do puppet shows. They get very caught up in caring for other people. To me, that’s the best part of it, the way they become when they’re tuned in to the plight of other people.”
Popolizio learned long ago that “the best thing to do when you’re suffering is get up and serve others and do something. That really pulled me through most of my life,” she said. When you’re focusing on someone else it’s impossible to wallow in your own self-pity.
Empathy for the elderly is a favorite lesson for the group because it comes with a lot of good-natured laughter. “We do experiential learning that shows what it feels like to be old,” Popolizio said.
Miss Emily gives each child a purse and sets up a pretend store. She has the kids tape popsicle sticks to their fingers, put gravel in their shoes and wear nonprescription glasses smeared with Vaseline to mimic the quagmires of aging their elderly friends and family face.
“They were challenged just trying to get the money out of the wallet,” Popolizio laughed.
For the unit on foster care, Popolizio introduced the kids to 4KIDS.org.
4KIDS Palm Beach (4kids.us/locations/palm-beach) opened in 2006 with a goal of supporting and recruiting foster families in Palm Beach County. Its mission is “to provide loving, Christian homes for these children, keep siblings together, and give hope and healing to kids, teens, and families through prevention and therapy services.”
In 2023, there were nearly 1,000 kids living apart from their families in Palm Beach County. Half of them were under 5 years old. Statewide, the number of kids living in “out-of-home placement” exceeded 17,000 kids. The numbers are staggering, but the kids got the message.
“When encouraged, the kids’ spirit for helping others is there,” Popolizio said. “I think that’s the intrinsic goodness that God places in all of us, and hopefully they grow up with a social conscience to right some of the wrongs. You can’t fix everything, but in the long run, acts of kindness and empathy for others is going to save all of us.”
Janis Fontaine writes about people of faith, their congregations, causes and community events. Contact her at fontaine423@outlook.com.
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