A senior at St. Hubert Catholic High School for Girls in Northeast Philadelphia has led her schoolmates to wage a friendly wargame with one another, all to help women in need.
Shea Kinka engaged her schoolmates in a campus-wide battle of the game Penny Wars during second semester to raise money for diapers and other items that help mothers and babies being served by Catholic Charities of Philadelphia’s Northeast Philadelphia Family Service Center (NEFSC).
“A lot of the girls love competing against other homerooms,” said Kinka, the founder and president of the school’s Women Supporting Women group.
“We were trying to figure out a good way that we could get people involved in raising money for this program, so we just thought of something where we could make it into a competition to help other students feel more excited about it and get more involved.”
The launch point for the fundraiser came from a conversation the school’s principal, Dr. Gina McKenzie, had with staff about how to implement an archdiocesan initiative to raise money for a growing need for diapers.
“Diapers are an expensive item for a lot of families to purchase. So I said, ‘Why don’t we expand this a little bit more, but also narrow the focus?’ Shay’s group was starting to becoming a meaningful force here at St. Hubert’s. We also work with the NEFSC,” MacKenzie said.
“I partnered them together and said, ‘Let’s focus on not just diapers, but all kinds of baby and mother needs.’ That’s very close to our heart here, as most of our young women will go on to have families someday.”
MacKenzie reached out to Kinka and Michele Levine, a Catapult counselor at the school who works with Women Supporting Women.
“I had the idea of Penny Wars because my children, back in the day, were involved in a game that was a lot of fun for the students. It became really engaging, and it really did raise a good amount of money,” Levine said.
The homeroom declarations of Penny Wars came soon after Christmas.
“Each penny is worth a point, and each dollar is worth 100 points. Pennies and bills add on to your points, and then silver coins such as dimes and quarters, they subtract from your points,” Kinka explains.
“If you see that another team is getting a lot of money in their jar, then you can use silver coins to mess up their work and have some of their points taken away so that you can help yourself win.”
This school-wide game of caring copper donations and dive-bombing dimes and quarters led some homerooms to do some surreptitious strategy.
“One of the homerooms started having a stash jar in their own room to try to sabotage everybody else,” Kinka said. “They had a secret jar of money that they were accumulating on their own in their own classroom.”
All this coin-dropping artillery added up to more than just the diapers the Archdiocese planned on for NEFSC, less than a half-mile from St. Hubert’s. It resulted in baby clothing, wipes, and additional items of desperate need for the mothers who come for help.
“They’re the women that I see God in, because they come so vulnerable, sometimes so hopeless, and when they come to us, we’re here to say, ‘We’re here, and we’re here because of our God,’” said NEFSC Administrator Beth Wood.
“This donation is just so wonderful because of the people that we serve, the vulnerability of the moms that are going through poverty or barriers to housing and health insurance, (proposed) cuts to WIC and so much else going on right now. So at this particular moment, this donation — as fun as it was — really does help us out.”
Wood said it also provided help in the early months of 2025, at a critical time when donations tend to dwindle.
“We get a lot of food donations for Thanksgiving, and then Christmas, we get a lot of toys, clothing and gift cards, and then the rest of the year is difficult to get them,” said Wood, who cites strong relationships with both St. Hubert’s and Father Judge High School.
“The donations alone, we can really count on them through the year and not just during those specified times of giving. So our relationships with both schools are really strong.”
Perhaps that relationship comes from the lessons Kinka and her group provide their classmates, the reason for giving – simply because God calls everyone to reach out to those on the margins of society.
“A lot of the girls in Women Supporting Women, they aren’t doing it because they want to look like a good person,” Kinka said. “I feel like a lot of it is because they actually want to do good things.”
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