In addition to mentoring students at Delbarton School in New Jersey, Abbot Giles Hayes has founded numerous social justice and community services programs at the school. Abbot Giles Hayes encourages students to feel compassion for their fellow human beings and “put the other guy first.”

In its most recent community support effort, Delbarton celebrated its 75th Anniversary by launching a food drive and setting an ambitious goal of collecting 75,000 pounds of food for local soup kitchens and food banks. The Campus Ministry team organized the effort and initiated the food drive at the school’s Homecoming event, where students donated canned items such as soup, sauces, and vegetables. After the Homecoming food drive, Delbarton donated the collected food to the Interfaith Food Pantry in Morris Plains.

The school will host a number of additional food drive events in order to reach its goal of 75,000 pounds of donated food. As the school notes, that amount is equal to approximately 37 tons of food, or the combined weight of around 300 professional football players.

Abbot Giles Hayes, college guidance counselor and former headmaster at Delbarton School in Morristown, New Jersey, seeks to teach each student about the value of service and prioritizing the needs of others. Abbot Giles Hayes brought Operation Smile Club to Delbarton in the early 1980s, and since that time has followed its success in helping students help children. 

An international medical charity, Operation Smile provides free cleft-lip and cleft-palate surgeries to children while raising money for awareness and treatment of these conditions. At Delbarton School, the Operation Smile Club partners with the organization to sponsor fundraisers and send students on surgical mission trips to sites around the world. The Club impacts not only the children it serves, but students like Conor White, Class of 2013, who received Operation Smile's Davis Shick Award in 2012. 

Conor White joined the Operation Smile Club in his freshman year at Delbarton School. By his junior year, he had signed on for mission work and traveled to the Middle East in the summer of 2012. There, he witnessed firsthand the impact that Delbarton School fundraisers had in making surgeries possible for children. Seeing the gratitude of both the children and their families after surgery, he returned to Delbarton to share his experience and encourage others to get involved. Delbarton’s Operation Smile chapter remains strong, and student volunteers have organized such events as the 4 Smiles Benefit Music Concert, which brought local performers together to raise money for Operation Smile in the spring of 2014.

Abbot Giles Hayes served as a teacher and administrator at the Delbarton School in Morristown, New Jersey, for more than four decades. Committed to social justice, Abbot Giles Hayes has developed and implemented a broad range of service opportunities for families in need in Appalachia.

Each year since 1980, young men from the Delbarton School in New Jersey have provided food and other necessities to families in need. Students begin by collecting clothing, blankets, nonperishable food staples, children's care items, and Christmas toys. All members of the school community may participate in the collection, and student volunteers deliver the items on a selected December Sunday.

Since the program began, Delbarton students have brought much-needed resources to families as far as Magoffin County, Kentucky. Local businesses have also stepped up to help the students succeed. Local media firm GraficaGroup participated in promoting the 2009 event, and New Jersey radio stations WMTR-AM and WDHA-FM have mentioned the project on air. Abbot Giles Hayes continues the program as a way of helping students develop a firsthand experience of poverty's realities as well as an understanding of their role in the wider community.