LifeSail is back. New and returning members were recruited all throughout last November via school announcements and emails. Seven students decided to join LifeSail this school year.  

HMSA and LifeSail have been partners since 2012. This year will be their fifth year working together. For the past four years, the Hawthorne Police Association has donated sponsorship money to passionate HMSA LifeSail members.

The goal of the HMSA LifeSail program is to build two sailboats over the course of twelve weeks. Students will be meeting every Friday during CP with HMSA’s LifeSail adviser Mr. Schulz, the founder of LifeSail and an off-campus expert in boat-building and sailing. By the end of the twelve weeks, students will get to paint the sailboats their choice of color and also give each sailboat its own name. In May, they will introduce their creations to the water for the first time in Marina del Rey.

LifeSail in an organization that primarily focuses on teaching students STEM activities through sailing. Before construction began, students got to experience the ocean breeze. The LifeSail group went on two all-expense-paid trips in early December 2015. They sailed on a yacht twice from Marina del Rey Harbor all the way to the Santa Monica Pier.

Two of the seven students are returning members. While students of all grade levels have joined LifeSail over the years, no student has ever been a member from ninth to twelfth grade. Mr. Berumen motivates returning members to continue developing into stronger leaders, and encourages new members to gain leadership skills. Some HMSA alumni have returned to help lead current HMSA students through the LifeSail program. Some have even decided to join the LifeSail organization as leaders, and mentor the inner-city youth.

Mr. Berumen feels joy and pride when he sees the students out in the water and learning how to use power tools foreign to them. Nothing beats seeing students smile after accomplishing something they thought they couldn’t do. Not always having to rely on others to fix everything is in itself a reward for students as well.

When asked what he would tell students who are unsure of joining LifeSail next year, Mr. Berumen said with a delicate smile, “It’s an experience of a lifetime.” He wishes LifeSail would have been an option for him while he was in high school.

Sophomore Andrea F. believes LifeSail is a great opportunity to help people build communication skills and to be more comfortable with the people around them. It also gives students the chance to build an actual working sailboat— something not many people have the privilege to do: “I mean, you can’t really wake up and be like, ‘Well, gonna go build a boat’, but with LifeSail you can.” 

Although she has been in this program for only a few months, she already feels more comfortable around her teammates, as well as her peers outside of LifeSail. She says, “I commit errors, [but] I also know that even though you may have started off rocky, you can still be very successful, and that’s comforting to me.”

LifeSail allows students to believe in themselves and in what they can accomplish when they work together to create something beautiful. Her favorite aspect of being a part of LifeSail is the amount of friendly interactions between the members: “I get to learn new things meanwhile having fun.”

Senior Jacqueline D. says she joined this program because she enjoys building in general and hands-on crafting. “LifeSail … teaches you leadership skills and other skills (such as using power tools) that may be useful in the future.” From her time in LifeSail, she learned how to properly handle power tools and use them in a safer way.

Junior Anas A. has been in LifeSail since his freshmen year and has found it to be very exciting: “I heard Mr. Berumen giving an announcement about, what I called ‘some sailing program’, and became interested.” After his first year, Anas decided to stay in this program because it gave him more than just a good experience. “I learned … [m]ore than just cutting wood [or] sanding it— I learned a lot about friendship and where we want to take ourselves in life.” 

Senior Vanessa V. states that all of the members learn to be leaders because they are trained to think for themselves and for others too. She also has very high expectations for this program: “I want to be able to learn how to sail without having an adult around to guide me.”

Like the other members, she has also learned from her experiences in LifeSail: “The one thing that I have learned is that you can never fail. As long as you try, you are always one step closer to succeeding.”