By: Blake Rabinowitz
On January 6th, Half Hollow Hills posted an image of Noah Rabinowitz with 125 cakes on Facebook. By January 13th over 1.5 million people viewed it and over 40,000 people reacted with a like, a heart, a wow, etc. As students, we are always warned about the power of social media. We are constantly told: Be careful what you post, you never know who will see it. In this case, the post was positive. This is an extraordinary story of the power of the internet and the spreading of kindness.
Noah, a sophomore at Hills East, started a program to help busy students give back to our community. As a student athlete, Noah was having trouble finding time to do community service and he thought he must not be the only one feeling this way, so he created Noah’s Community Cakes. The mission of this program is to allow students to multi-task by baking cakes for those in need, while studying when the cakes are baking in the oven. The program bakes and donates cakes to Mercy Inn Soup Kitchen in Wyandanch NY, where they serve free lunch Monday-Friday.
As a member of One World Youth Club, the club advisor, Ms. D’Onofrio, helped support Noah’s initiative and the club collected ingredients for Noah to bake 100 cakes for Thanksgiving and Christmas, hence the picture of Noah with all the cakes. To fully understand the extent of the most viewed Facebook post in HHH history, I interviewed Chip Parker, the Public Relations Director at the Half Hollow Hills Central School District. Part of his job is to create and manage our district’s social media channels.
To put this post in context I asked him detailed questions regarding HHH’s Facebook posts.
HHH post history:
Typical views- 1,300-1,800
Good views- 3,000-5,000
Exceptional views- over 10,000
A Few Special Posts views- 20,000-70,000
Noah’s Community Service Post views- over 1.5 million
To quote Mr. Parker directly: “Noah’s post has been an albatross. We’ve never had anything perform like it. The typical shares of posts are 1-3, Noah’s post has 1,000 shares.”
I also asked him, based on his experience, why does he think this post was so popular.
“It’s challenging to say with any certainty. Certain content resonates with people, and Noah’s story of a service project appears to have struck a chord. I definitely think that baking being a part of it was a heavy influencing factor in its performance, along with the attachment to a soup kitchen. Both pieces appear to have appealed to mass
audiences, largely older and from across the country.”
Lastly, in reference to Noah’s post, I asked if there were any comments worth sharing about this post.
“There were lots of people who commented on how happy they were to see a teen doing something like this. That they want to see more positive stories like this. That they loved seeing someone young baking. And even one from Iceland saying, “Great job!” So, the appeal of this story was broad and far reaching.”
This story shows the power of the internet, but more importantly it shows the power of giving back to our community and that the world is looking for kindness. In speaking with Mr. Parker about our social media he had an important message for our students.
“In Half Hollow Hills, we encourage all our students to participate in service-learning programs to learn about the importance of volunteering, while building a life-long love of giving back to your community. We’re thrilled to share those stories with our community via our social media channels.”
Noah’s post connected with people across the country and even the world, it’s definitely one for the history books in Half Hollow Hills!
If you would like to “like” Noah’s post and as well as other Half Hollow Hills posts please go here: Facebook
To learn more about Noah’s Community Cakes visit the website at: Home | Noah’s Community Cakes (noahscommunitycakes.com)
Teamup4community- a website dedicated to supporting athletes giving back to their community, wrote a profile on Noah’s Community Cakes, find it here: News Archives | Team Up 4 Community
To learn more about Mercy Inn Soup Kitchen and how you can help their mission, please go to: https://mercyinn.org/
