For Oak Park and River Forest High School senior Vincent Czarnkowski, the route to leading multiple clubs came from a desire to help others.
Czarnkowski has spent quite a bit of time doing exactly that, as co-president of the service club Huskies for Hope, activities coordinator of the Hispanic club ASPIRA and as a member of MENA, the Middle Eastern and North African Alliance. Czarnkowski joined ASPIRA as a freshman and joined Huskies for Hope and MENA as a junior.
“Every year he got more and more involved,” said Kelly Diaz, a Spanish teacher at OPRF and one of the co-sponsors of ASPIRA. “He’s very mindful and organized. This year he’s definitely taken a very big leadership role in planning, organizing a lot of activities and mentoring too. He mentors a lot of the younger students that are here.”
When Oak Park suddenly became home to asylum seekers in 2023, Czarnkowski felt compelled to help as many people as he could. A fluent speaker of English, Polish and Spanish, he began tutoring English as well as making and bringing people food through a system called meal trains. Additionally he has been helping migrants translate their asylum documents.
In an October 2023 story, Trapeze observed Czarnkowski translating for recently arrived migrants outside the District 15 Police Station in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood. “Even though they’re not from the same country as me, there’s still something that connects them to me,” he told Trapeze reporter Imani Sanders. “I just want to see them succeed. That’s why I feel a need to help.”
Czarnkowski ended up helping out almost every weekend. This led him to get to know a lot of people, some of whom have become his very close friends. That’s how he got to know Sofia Hernandez, the other co-president of Huskies for Hope.
“The first time I met Vincent, we were at a police station. It was like right when all the migrants started to come into Chicago from Texas,” said Hernandez, who is a junior. “He has so many connections and extracurriculars, like ASPIRA, that also…connected to what we’re doing, and it’s just made him very knowledgeable about what we were working on. He has such a busy schedule, but he makes things work, and he’s very proactive.”
A big concern for Czarnkowski though, was making sure to get others involved as well.
“He’s really passionate and not only about volunteering but also with getting other students involved in volunteering” said Katie O’Keefe, a counselor at OPRF and the Huskies for Hope sponsor. “He gets nervous when we don’t have as many volunteer opportunities because he wants other kids to be able to volunteer too.”
For Czarnkowski, a big focus on helping others has been making people feel like they have a place where they belong. As OPRF was introducing the new students who had recently immigrated here, while the adults were making sure the students had the supplies and other necessities to attend school, Czarnkowski put his focus elsewhere. He and other ASPIRA leaders gave the new students tours of the school, made sure they could find their classrooms and made sure that these students had someone to sit with during lunch.
Along with joining Huskies for Hope, Czarnkowski also joined MENA in 2023. Since then he has helped organize events both inside and outside of school.
“We all do what we can when we can,” said Czarnkowski, “We recently had the Palestinian Day of Culture, and before that we had a panel at a church about solidarity. There were local activists, a Columbian professor and rabbis.”
Outside of school, Czarnkowski is learning how to play the cuatro, which is a Venezuelan stringed instrument. He also plays the classical guitar and the charango, and enjoys reading nonfiction and historical fiction.
