Address Delivered by Andrew & Perri Cohen, Senior High School Fellowship Awardees, Evening of Recognition Dinner May 5, 2013

Perri: To be completely honest, Andrew and I first got involved in this organization as a way to fulfill our community service requirement in order to become bar and bat-mitzvah at our synagogue. And like all 12 and 13 year olds forced into community service...we weren’t too keen on doing it...at this point we were only doing Sunday Circle for two hours every month. Andrew: After we satisfied our hours requirement, our mom signed us up to work with a boy with autism on a weekly basis, she told us his name was Robert. Again, initially it felt like a job more than anything else. At the time, as much as we were not that eager to be going over to Robert’s house to do community service with him, he didn’t seem like he wanted us there either. For the first couple of times, he cried, he’d throw tantrums and try and hide himself in his room just so that Perri and I wouldn’t come back...either that or he really didn’t like playing Chutes and Ladders...Regardless, Perri and I stuck with it. For Perri, I think it was because she knew it was a good thing to be doing. And for me, I was too lazy to tell my mom I didn’t want to be going anymore... Well, it’s five years later and Perri and I still go every week to see Robert, and Perri goes more than that to babysit him when Linda needs her. At some point in the five years we’ve been playing with Robert, my relationship with him transitioned from a “job” to me considering him a close friend. I think the first time I realized this was a couple years ago when I was exhausted and didn’t go one day. Robert called me from Perri’s phone and woke me up and said, “I miss you Andrew, can you come play with me, now?” And I see some of you making “oh that’s so cute” faces, but trust me, after that phone call, I didn’t feel good about myself...I felt like I had let down Robert, that I had let down a friend...it was a really terrible feeling, so bad actually that I think since then I’ve only missed going to his house one or two times. But that’s when I realized that I really cared about Robert and that I had a responsibility to him as a good friend to be there for him. It’s funny, I sat down to write this and I was thinking about how long Perri and I have been friends with Robert...I’ve been friends with him for longer than I’ve been friends with 80% of the people I consider my best friends who are my age...I mean Robert has asked me...multiple times, I might add, if I could be his brother, if I could legally change my name to Andrew Bolton. I think this really exemplifies what this program does and what it stands for. It’s a program that is just as much about the “volunteers” (for lack of a better word) as it is about the friends who the “volunteers” work with. It’s a program that creates special friendships--meaningful friendships that don’t dwindle with time because the impact we have made on each other is too dramatic to forget.