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Photos: Swin Cash works with City Year New York for MLK Day of Service – Metro US

Photos: Swin Cash works with City Year New York for MLK Day of Service

To honor the memory of the civil rights leader, City Year New York and Olympic gold medalist and former New York Liberty star Swin Cash, along with more than 1,000 other volunteers, spent Martin Luther King Day doing community service work in Bronx-area public schools.

“It’s the actions that we take every single day … that impact people’s lives,” said New York State Assembly Member Marcos Crespos at the Day of Service’s opening rally. “If we do a little more of those things … we strengthen the only thing that binds us all: love.”

The project was not just to beautify the previously stark beige walls of Bronx schools JHS 123 and MS 337, but to provide young students in high-risk areas role models of color to look up to, such as Ellen Ochoa and Franklin Chang Diaz, the first people of Hispanic descent to go into space.

“You can be the change in your community,” Cash, a two-time Olympic gold medalist who played 15 WNBA seasons, including three with the Liberty, said to assembled volunteers.

City Year New York runs a network of “near-peer” mentors for students at “high-need” elementary and middle schools, who work to provide students academic and emotional support to cope with stressful and sometimes dangerous out-of-school environments.