When it came time for Sulphur High School LEAD Council to do good in their community, they didn’t have to look far.

The Sulphur Senior Center, the school’s neighbor, provides a place for seniors to socialize, and receive certain services. With help from Sulphur High School LEAD Council, it will be a little easier to call – and hear – during BINGO now with more places to sit at more tables and easier transition to get in and out of the building.  Students even pitched in on getting word out in the community about the good things happening at the Sulphur Senior Center to attract more participants. (It’s much more than BINGO.)

This is the seventh year for LEAD, a Tellurian program with local schools, and the acronym for Leadership, Development And Enrichment. Tellurian is the parent company of the Driftwood LNG project in Carlyss. The focus of the program is to help generate future community leaders.

Ian Landry, a Sulphur High School student and other LEAD Council members gathered with community leaders Tuesday in the Sulphur Senior Center’s pool room to share a year-end report of their work.

“Our members are selected through an application process, and we are given $20,000 to do good in our community,” Landry said.

Through LEAD, students focus “not on what’s in here,” said Tellurian’s Terri Bachand, as she mimicked holding a cell phone – “but what’s out there.”

After gathering information about the unmet needs of the Senior Center, funding was used to purchase a sound and public address system, tables and chairs with mobile cart storage, signage, Mardi Gras T-shirts, gift cards and sidewalks for safer navigation.

Perhaps just as important, LEAD youth spent time at the Senior Center in conversation, in laughter. They reorganized a storage unit, and they demonstrated respect for their elders.

Sulphur Senior Center director Cynthia Beverly said the program did more than meet needs, it also met wants.

“We wanted some young people to come here and hang out with the seniors and play games and be silly,” Beverly said.

SHS lead teacher facilitator Tyrella Bushnell said the students stayed engaged, took initiative, and even worked on the project over the holidays.

For this year’s project, the LEAD Council didn’t just develop leadership skills and complete a community project. One of the students reported that through her work with seniors at the center, her relationship with her grandmother is now flourishing.

Past Tellurian LEAD Council “doing good” community projects have been filling food pantries, making traffic safer around schools, administering scholarships to tech camps, refurbishing parks, funding a COVID-19 emergency response fund, helping rebuild the Epps Memorial Library, helping expand Abraham’s Tent serviced and helping with the St. Nicholas Center for Children STEPS Program.