What We Build Together

On any given day at Browne Academy, the impact of a community can be easy to miss.

It looks like children racing across a playground, negotiating the rules of a game as they go. It is a student stepping onto a brightly lit stage, nervous but ready to perform. It is paint on a canvas, an idea taking shape, or—soon—a class carrying its learning outdoors beneath a new pavilion.

These are simply parts of a Browne childhood. But look more closely, and they tell another story: one about what becomes possible when people decide not just to belong to a community, but to help build it.

For the past six years, Browne parents Christine and Aiden Kaskela have made that choice again and again.

As chair of the Bruin Benefit, Christine has worked alongside Browne’s Director of Advancement, fellow parents, volunteers, faculty, staff, and school leaders to rally the community around ideas for strengthening the student experience. During that time, those collective efforts have helped generate approximately $1.5 million in philanthropic support.

The number is significant. What it has become is more important.

It has become two new playgrounds—places where children test their courage, navigate friendships, solve disagreements, invent games, and discover what they can do.

It has become new lighting for Browne’s performing arts stage, where students have the chance to step forward and be seen. It has strengthened the arts, creating more opportunities for children to experiment, make, perform, and find forms of expression that are distinctly their own. And it will help create a new pavilion and outdoor learning space, now in the permitting phase, designed to expand where learning and community can happen on campus.

Recently, Browne honored Christine and Aiden with the Greystone Award—given to those whose service and contributions have changed the destiny of Browne Academy—in recognition of their extraordinary commitment to the school. Thanks to the Kaskela family, Browne Academy has trained teachers and staff in the Responsive Classroom framework. When asked what that impact means for our community, Associate Head of School, Kim McCue, shared: 

“The real impact of Responsive Classroom is that it has made best practices instinctive. The training has given our teachers a shared language and approach to creating caring, connected classrooms, across grade levels and disciplines, where students feel known and supported.”

After being presented with the Greystone Award, Christine and Aiden shared the following about what Browne means to their family:

“Browne Academy is a place where every child is known, valued and taught to be kind, compassionate human beings. Being able to give back to the school and teachers who have given our family so much is an absolute honor. Whether it’s supporting our teachers, donating to a project, volunteering your time or simply showing up for our kids, every single contribution makes a tangible difference. Our kids and our community are so worth it.”

But Christine and Aiden’s story is powerful precisely because it is not theirs alone.

Leadership, at its best, creates momentum. It invites other people in. It turns an idea into a conversation, a conversation into shared purpose, and shared purpose into something tangible.

Christine and Aiden understand that personally. Their two children—a fifth grader and a second grader—are very different from one another. In accepting the award, they reflected on their gratitude that Browne has been the right place for both of them, just as it has been for so many children: a school where individual interests and passions are nurtured while the care and commitment surrounding each child remain constant.

Perhaps that is where meaningful parent involvement begins.

Families see teachers who know their children deeply. They watch confidence emerge, interests take hold, friendships deepen, and possibilities expand. And sometimes, gratitude for what already exists becomes curiosity about what else might be possible.

At Browne, community has never meant simply occupying the same place. It asks something more of us: to participate, to listen, to contribute our talents, to bring people together, and to take some responsibility for the community we hope our children will inherit.

Years from now, Browne students may not know the names of everyone who helped create the spaces where they play, perform, create, and learn.

They will know what those spaces allowed them to become.

And perhaps that is one of the quietest measures of a strong school community: people cared enough about its future to help shape it.