When Sarah Bennison departs campus after speaking at an all-school convocation on September 22, her hope is that faculty and students have “a new understanding of why feeling valued matters, a clearer sense of their own unique gifts, and a renewed sense of empowerment to contribute to their classrooms and communities.” 

“The goal,” she continued in a recent interview, “isn’t another program or initiative to add on; it’s to ignite ideas and imagination, and to inspire action that deepens the work already happening. Mattering is a skill, and, like any skill, it can be learned. Each person can become an architect of mattering in their own lives and beyond.” 

Ms. Bennison is a faculty member at New York University and the founder of the nonprofit Mattering in Action. 

“When we recognize our deep, shared need to matter, we can build communities that honor the dignity and humanity of every individual, making schools more human,” Ms. Bennison said. 

Loomis Chaffee will bring six speakers to the school this year for convocations in its Hubbard Speaker Series, made possible by a gift from Robert P. Hubbard ’47. Five of the six are set; the sixth, to be announced, will come to campus in April during the school’s celebration of Earth Week. 

“This group of speakers has unique ways of tackling the question of ‘what matters’ through broad backgrounds and diverse life experiences,” says Matt Kammrath, the director of the Norton Family Center for the Common Good, which coordinates the speaker series.  

“What matters?” is the all-school question this school year. 

Ms. Bennison has a doctorate in history and education and more than 25 years of teaching and leadership experience. She is the founder of the Trinity School Office of Public Service in New York City, a K-12 service-learning initiative in which students work with community-based organizations within five blocks of Trinity. They address local needs, Ms. Bennison said, such as food insecurity, housing, educational inequality, urban poverty, and the challenges facing the elderly.  

"Through hands-on, local work, students were learning about critical global issues,” she said. "While this began as a service program, for years students reported profound mental health benefits from the work. When they checked in with me after returning to the building, I heard the same things over and over: reduced stress, lower anxiety, less loneliness, and an expanded sense of who they were in the world beyond the pressures of a high-achieving school.

"Years later, when I learned about the scholarship of mattering — rooted in social psychology and reaching across disciplines — I realized that what I had witnessed for years wasn’t anecdotal. It was science. Scholars define mattering as feeling valued and adding value; when Trinity students engaged in weekly, ongoing service work, they felt valued for who they were, deep down, and they contributed in ways that had genuine impact. What I had seen for years, I finally had a name for: mattering in action.” 

Other Speakers 

November 3: Aaron Dinin 

Mr. Dinin teaches innovation and entrepreneurship at Duke University and “has spent his career studying how people learn, experiment, and adapt in uncertain environments,” according to his website.  

He says he spent years “watching brilliant students sabotage their futures because they were scared to be wrong. So, I stopped designing classes that chase success and started designing ones that make failure survivable (and maybe even a little bit fun).”  

Failure, he says, can be “a tool for learning, creativity, and growth.” 

He also has more than a decade of experience as a tech entrepreneur and software developer. 

December 9: Ruth Weiner 

In 2023 Ms. Weiner, a Holocaust survivor, came to Loomis for an event sponsored by the Rubenstein Family Holocaust Education Fund through the Norton Center. Richard ’65 and Lea Rubenstein attended the event. The fund supports the education of Loomis Chaffee students on the Holocaust.   

In its coverage, the school newspaper said that Ms. Weiner “emphasized the importance of sharing her narrative, noting that by hearing her and other Holocaust survivors’ stories, students can become new witnesses of the atrocities that took place during World War II.” 

January 19: Shaun Harper, MLK Week Speaker 

In 2022 Shaun Harper was appointed university professor of business, education and public policy, a distinction bestowed to only 27 of the 4,700 University of Southern California full-time faculty members. He also is the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership and the USC Race and Equity Center’s founder and chief research scientist. His research focuses primarily on race, gender, and other dimensions of equity in educational, corporate, and policymaking contexts. He has published 13 books and more than 100 other academic publications.  

Mr. Harper has worked with hundreds of businesses, agencies, and institutions. His research, according to USC, has been cited in thousands of published studies, in multiple amicus briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court, and on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.  

February 15: Darryl Bellamy 

Mr. Bellamy partners with schools to empower students not to eliminate fear but to embrace it and work through it. As he says on his website, “We’ve been told to be fearless. To push through. To hide the fear. To never let them see us sweat. But suppressing fear isn’t the answer. Neither is letting it paralyze the process.” 

For more than 10 years he has collected thousands of hand-written descriptions of fears from people of all ages. This, he says, is what he has found: “We all face similar struggles, even when it feels like we’re alone. Our hidden fears are what connect us most. We’ve been taught fear is weakness, but fear actually pushes us to be better and achieve more. When we have a process and community to work through fear, we take more action, and everyone gets better. When fear stops being something we avoid, it becomes something we can use to ... build the future we want.”