"As a community, we need to come together to help children,” says Lynneth Solis, a junior psychology major at La Sierra University. So when Solis’s community involvement class, part of La Sierra’s Service Learning program, required her to participate in a service project, she jumped at the opportunity.

Solis found that Foothill Elementary, a 150-student public school in Riverside, Calif., needed help with an after school program. Having worked with a Vacation Bible School program at the Adventist church in her hometown of El Centro, Calif., she had experience with creative children’s projects and decided that a puppet program might be the way to go.

Solis recruited a couple of classmates, junior pre-med students Sung No and Ashley Tarasen, to help with the project and proposed the idea to the elementary school officials. The plan was enthusiastically approved, and the team got to work.

Solis now has 20 children working on their first puppet show, a moral story about a dragon that kidnaps a princess. In the story, the dragon learns a valuable lesson about being kind to others, and the princess learns to care for bullies instead of judging them.

Once the production is finished, the children in the program will present it to the rest of their school during an assembly.

Solis didn’t want the children to just be spectators, so she made the program very hands-on. “Children need to be active in what they’re doing, or they get bored and don’t learn,” she says. The children are directly involved in every detail of the production, which teaches them lessons far beyond dealing with bullies.

“Lots of these kids are ones who have been deemed ‘at risk,’” she says. “They don’t always learn at home that their ideas and contributions are valuable. In this program, they can see their work and think, ‘Wow, I created this!’ And they see that they have something worthwhile to offer that people will appreciate.”

“The children just love working on this project,” says Adeny Schmidt, Ph.D., professor of psychology and instructor of Solis’s community involvement class. “They’re learning to write, to manage time and to be responsible."

Solis hopes to make this project an ongoing program. “The first show is like a pilot,” she says. “Hopefully we can do at least one show per year.” She also has plans to start training sessions to equip other university students to lead similar programs.

Solis believes that her puppet program is just a small part of a larger calling. “We are a community on earth, and we’re supposed to be working for each other,” she says. “It’s a blessing to be able to be God’s hands and feet to these kids.”