In Its First Year, CA’s Positivity and Light Society Recognizes the Impacts of Student Service
At a ceremony in May, CA’s new Positivity and Light Society (PALS) recognized 60 students for contributing more than 2,000 collective hours of service to local communities. Spearheaded by Robyn Bostrom P’24, PALS was established through the generosity of a group of parents and organized in collaboration with a committee of student ambassadors, faculty, and staff.
Families gathered in the Centennial Arts Center to celebrate their children’s commitment to helping others in need. The ceremony also honored the living legacy of the alum who inspired the society’s creation, Axel Bostrom ’24, who died following a car accident in June 2025.
Axel grew up volunteering. For the Bostroms, a military family, service was a shared value and a way to get to know each community they entered. Axel’s Eagle Scout project benefited Bethesda Cares, a Maryland organization that helps people experiencing homelessness. In Massachusetts, he participated annually in A Shot For Life, a basketball challenge that raises money for brain cancer research. And in his everyday interactions, he consistently took the initiative to care for others, including helping new students acclimate to CA.
Having heard an outpouring of stories of Axel’s generosity from his friends and the CA community, Robyn says that as she and her husband, Paul Bostrom P’24, considered how to honor their son’s memory, “positivity and light were the two words that came to mind.” By the end of the summer, they knew they wanted to encourage service.
In CA, whose only award is given to alums for service, Robyn saw philosophical alignment. She wanted to recognize the service CA students already engage in through clubs and weekend volunteer outings organized by the Student Life Office, provide more resources to broaden those volunteer opportunities, and make service more visible alongside academics, the arts, and athletics at CA. She hoped to create new student leadership positions and encourage additional aid to local communities by developing a resource any CA club, team, student, or faculty member could use to organize service trips. She wanted all students to have an opportunity to participate, and she hoped to give those who knew Axel a positive way to channel their grief.
“I think of Axel like a prism,” she says. “He shined his light, and it refracted on everybody who ever met him. To me, service is like that. One person’s gift of time and attention can impact so many people.”
That’s why in May, she presented a crystal prism to each of the society’s first 20 members, who had all given 100 or more hours of service. Additional students were recognized for meeting an inaugural “Six for ’26” spring-semester challenge and for 10, 25, 50, and 75 hours of service.
At the ceremony, Grant Hightower, assistant head for student life, reflected on Axel as a standout scholar and athlete and a role model for his dedication to his communities. “To bring positivity and light requires only that you recognize those around you as worthy of receiving yours,” he said. “Light and positivity are infinite resources. When you care to use your light to illuminate your neighbor’s path, your flame does not flicker or fade. Instead, the road simply gets brighter. By choosing to serve, you aren’t just performing a task. You are refusing to let the darkness of isolation win. You are proving that when we stop trying to blend into the unseen and dare to reflect one another’s brilliance, we don’t just see the path ahead, we become the way for others to find it as well.”
The PALS Planning Committee had asked students to submit reflections on their volunteer journeys. Many attested to the profound personal impact of their service.
At CA, Lyle Waldek ’26, an inaugural PALS member, co-headed the Lawrence-Concord Action Partnership, organizing student trips to Lazarus House Ministries and outdoor cleanups in Lawrence, Mass., and 91Թ Notes of Compassion, a group that performs at senior living residences. Over time, he wrote, “I have been able to see that service of any kind is much more complex, collaborative, and beautiful than I believed it to be.”
Many other students recognized by PALS had previously spent years volunteering. With experience at Project 351, Cradles to Crayons, Rise Against Hunger, and the YMCA, among other local organizations, Melina Petropulos ’28 is a teen ambassador at her local food pantry in Newton, Mass., as well as a PALS student ambassador and one of the society’s first members. “I’ve come to think that empathy without action is incomplete,” she wrote.
For others, service was a new step. Christopher Choy ’27 recognized that, living in Boston, he’d been conditioned to view the unhoused community through the social stigma that goes unchecked in mainstream media. “I wanted to confront the stereotypes about homelessness and learn more about how the unhoused could be cared for instead of stigmatized,” he wrote.
The personal interactions he had while volunteering at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter in Cambridge, Mass., revealed his similarities with residents and helped him understand the complex systemic factors that contribute to homelessness and inequality. He will serve as a PALS student ambassador during the 2026–27 school year.
Gavi Miller ’27 wanted to see her fellow CA students more involved with the Concord, Mass., community. This fall, she started a reading buddies partnership with kindergarteners at Alcott Elementary School. “Now, every other week, I get to watch my vision come to life: students just starting their academic journey looking up to ones with experience,” she wrote. “They learn from us, and we learn from them.”
In the first year of PALS, CA students showed their commitment to communities in Concord and beyond. By being so motivated to serve without any graduation requirement, Robyn says, they set a “gold standard.” She’s proud to have created a pathway at CA to recognize their contributions and, just as importantly, to have opened up more opportunities for them to experience the joy of lending a helping hand.
