When I was in Catholic grade school, we raised money for “pagan babies.� Each classroom collected coins into a box and eventually raised enough cash to support a child in a far-off developing nation. As a bonus, we were allowed to choose names for them. Wherever those kids are now, I hope they never found out that we were calling them pagans, or that we gave them names like Tracy and Derek.

Thankfully, schools are apparently taking all kinds of approaches to humanitarian assistance these days. Today at Manhattanville College, about 300 high school students came together to discuss ways to fight poverty and human rights abuses around the world. Students led discussions with other students about human trafficking, oppression in China, AIDS in Africa and slavery in Sudan. The event was the sixth annual Human Rights Institute for High School Student Leaders, organized by the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center in Purchase.

I sat in on a session where students from Gorton High School in Yonkers talked about genocide in Darfur. Their school’s Unity Club adopted a village in southern Sudan, Kajokeji, and raised money to supply 470 “solar cookersâ€? for women in the village. The devices help save lives, 17-year-old Sheila Rodriguez said, because women risk being raped or killed when they go out to collect wood for cooking.

The club is also trying to supply 4,000 notebooks and pencils to the village each year, advisor Beth Quinn said. Otherwise, schoolchildren are left to draw with a stick in the dirt. The Unity Club has grown to 50 members, the largest club at the school, she said.

“I think knowledge is power,� 17-year-old Sully Mejia said. She and Sheila challenged everyone in the room to do their part.

Leslie Feigenbaum, a 15-year-old at Croton-Harmon High School, plans to distribute bags to the homes in her neighborhood that can be filled with donations and collected later. Gabriela Vazquez, a 15-year-old at Cornwall Central High School, said she could money at local school plays.

Later, Ann Curry of NBC News discussed her experiences in Chad. The daylong institute was in preparation for Upstander Day, May 23, which encourages students to be “upstanders, not bystanders.�

“I just want to know, who here has the passion to do something?� Sully asked a room full of peers. All the hands floated up.