Project 351’s Regional Team Leaders posing for a photo outside the entrance to Gillette Stadium. Photo submitted by Ella Whitfield.
Israa Howard attended this event as an alumnus but was the Malden ambassador in 2025.
Over 200 ambassadors, alumni, and volunteers woke up as early as five to prepare for the celebration at Gillette Stadium and reunite for the 2026 reunion. Project 351 is a youth-led, non-profit founded in 2011 by Carolyn Casey. Each year, students from every public school in all 351 cities/towns in Massachusetts (including Cape Cod and Nantucket) are selected by their 8th-grade teachers to represent their city/town as an ambassador.
During their ambassador year, they lead service projects like clothing and food drives. Skill development, civic engagement, kindness, empathy, and inclusion are some of the many values taught at Project 351 that ambassadors use for the rest of their lives.
In Malden, Linden STEAM Academy and the Beebe School participate in the project. In 2025, the ambassadors were Brylie Leshane and me. For the Class of 2026, the ambassadors are Valentina Brown and Atticus Hickey, who have recently wrapped up their clothing drives at their schools.
The day began when I was dropped off at my location to meet my bus captain as well as the ambassadors I would be with on the bus. As more and more buses came pouring in, I was welcomed by my fellow alumni who had arrived earlier than me. I made my way inside to receive my new alumni shirt and name tag.
Clara Corcoran, a Regional Team leader, voiced that “it was just so amazing seeing all the ambassadors there because ambassador year is just such a great time and reunion, especially because you get to see all the friends that you met from launch, and you get to have more service opportunities on that day. It’s just such a fun day, and I’m really glad that they got to experience that.”
Soon after everyone was settled in, Lisa Hughes, a WBZ news anchor, invited three ambassadors to the stage and interviewed them. I watched Hughes ask the ambassadors about how they felt seeing the lives they had impacted in just less than a year after they wrapped up their clothing drive drop off the weekend before.
Once Hughes wrapped up the ambassador interviews, the audience welcomed our founder, Carolyn Casey, and our Educator Advisory Group chair, Mary Cringan, to the stage. They began by thanking everyone and establishing how happy they were to see everyone, especially alumni like myself who couldn’t go to Launch Day. They went on to bring up Ambassador Kwamboka Kabaya, who was preparing to announce the Starfish award recipient.
Before every reunion, ambassadors select an educator to give the award to and recite a speech to the audience about that educator. After Kabaya brought her teacher up to the stage, they shared a long hug and returned to their seats, and Casey returned to the stage to look back four years.
Casey delivered a heartfelt speech about the Project 351 class of 2022, who are seniors and were also the COVID class. She thanked them for their hard work over the past four years and for staying the night at Gillette to set up for reunion. The team created a heartfelt video sharing the seniors’ photos from 2022 and then their senior photos with the college they plan to attend.
She named seniors Chelsea Barnor, Keegan Butler, Benson Chang, Isabelle Alphonse, Robbie Moyes, and Chisom Agbanari for the awards, and they were all then brought up and took a photo together.
Then came the annual Kraft scholarship recipient. The Kraft family has had a long-lasting relationship with Project 351 since it was founded. Every year since then, Josh Kraft and Project 351 staff select a senior who will receive the Myra H. Kraft scholarship in honor of his mother. This year, the recipient was Jay Patel, who delivered a speech that left tears in the audience’s eyes.
The next guest speaker was the Celtics’ Community Manager Tome Barros. Every year, the Celtics partner with Project 351 for the Playbook Initiative, an anti-bias and discrimination initiative that began in 2019 and is still going strong. Playbook trainers who are also alumni, mostly recognized by their green shirts, had us look at the back of their tag to see which station they would be in.
As they began counting off from 1-7, each group made their way to the luxury suites at Gillette, where seniors greeted and had them run through scenarios to discuss with them the importance of empathy and standing up for those who can’t. In my group, there was a scenario regarding gender discrimination in school sports. As each group made it back to the main area, Barros and the seniors invited one ambassador from each group to share what they had discussed in their stations.
The last guest on the stage was Mary McDonald, a multisport wheelchair teen athlete, who was interviewed along with Barros by senior legacy fellow Benson Chang. McDonald spoke about her athletic accomplishments, why it’s important to always try your hardest, and where that courage brought her today.
After McDonald’s interview, everyone dispersed to lunch. Around the entire room, caterers had set up different areas to get their food as ambassadors went to eat lunch in the stands. But that wasn’t the plan for the Regional Leadership Team, of which I am a new member. RLTs had a scheduled time to meet in front of registration to prepare for the annual walk around Gillette.
However, because of the World Cup matches being held at Gillette, the reunion had to happen two months earlier than usual. Customarily, Project 351 would hold Earth Day service around the state, but it was decided to have Reunion first.
After the RLTs and I were briefed on the new plan, we dispersed to their locations. About fifteen minutes later, ambassadors made their way around Gillette, where alumni cheered them on with high-fives. Then, everyone made their way through the forests of Gillette and wrapped up the first Earth Day walk.
As everyone was being welcomed back to the main stage, we were all shocked to see members of the New England Patriots on stage with a 351 volunteer. Six members of the Patriots came to serve with ambassadors and alumni.
“I was really excited to see the Patriots there because I think it is so important that the athletes we look up to show us that leadership and community service really do matter and can make real change, and I just thought it was amazing for the ambassadors to see them there helping them and supporting them,” Corcoran expressed.
He further explained that everyone’s tag had station names they would go to. For example, the Dignity station is where we made hygiene packages with shampoo, toothpaste, toothbrushes, body wash, and deodorant. My next station was Nourish, where we made nutritional food packages. Every station had the goal to produce the most packages, with a goal of at least 200.
After all the fun at the service stations, it was time for dinner. Everyone made their way to a large room with over 20 tables and waited to get food. After everyone was settled in, Carolyn Casey shared information about the merch sale as well as future events.
Specifically for alumni was an opportunity to be a ball person at the annual mental health awareness game that the New England Revolution played on May 9th. Ambassadors and alumni can also submit a design for a scarf that would be sold in the gift shop at Gillette, and the designer would be honored on the field as well.
An event for everyone is the Regional Service. Every ambassador belongs to a region in Massachusetts and Project 351 numbers them each. For example, Malden is a part of region 11 with at least 7 other cities/towns.
During regional service, which was supposed to be in April but was switched to June, everyone is assigned to a part of Massachusetts to clean up the environment. In 2025, I got to participate in a riverbank cleanup in Boston.
The day soon came to an end, and our buses were called. As ambassadors poured out of the room, they left with the best feeling, knowing they had helped so many just at the age of 13.
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