I’ve been mulling over a comment made in another thread about national service and requiring young people to volunteer in underserved communities as a way of broadening perspectives.
In the midwest community where we raised our D, volunteering started early, mostly through church but through school as well. Many (if not most) schools had volunteer service requirements for graduation. My D’s HS has pretty strict requirements about what counted for those hours and what types of communities you needed to be serving.
I’m now wondering how common is that? Did your kids volunteer? Was it a HS requirement? What kind of work and populations did they serve?
My D started volunteering in small ways at age 8 through church, mostly around food insecurity - serving at soup kitchens, food pantries, food collection and delivery type things (the later with parent involvement). Starting in middle school there were bigger local projects in the summer where they worked in everything from inner city community garden to shelters to farms. By high school it was heavy lifting work at migrant farms, shelters, house re-building in disaster prone areas, etc… There was a big emphasis on making connections with the people she was helping and spending time listening and hearing their stories and getting to know them.
I personally think those experiences were as valuable as her academic education.
My kids only volunteered a tiny amount (and no volunteering was required by their boarding schools, although there were some opportunities).
One volunteered at a food bank, another at a nearby zoo and at a school for kids with intellectual disabilities, and the third coached local kids. But nothing really stuck, and none of those activities really influenced my kids. They were not working with others their age from diverse economic backgrounds, which is one of the benefits from national service.
If I could wave a wand, kids doing national service would NOT live at home but would be sent to other areas of the country.
National Honor Society had a volunteer requirement. I’m not sure our school did. But both of our kids did volunteer something in high school (and beyond).
And like @cinnamon1212 I volunteer my time for several things.
My D26s school does have a service requirement, but it’s pretty broadly satisfied, I think. FWIW, all of our kids have been volunteering through their local church for a while, so it’s been an easy requirement to satisfy.
Endorse! Please wave your magic wand to make this happen. I’d love to see this as well.
Our HS doesn’t have a general volunteering requirement, and doesn’t track external volunteer hours in any way.
Some individual classes at the HS have a “service” requirement that is tracked and included as part of a student’s grade. So for example, my kids’ math classes have specifically required a certain number of peer tutoring hours, and their orchestra class has a somewhat more flexible service requirement with various options (my kids fulfilled this by helping out at the local middle school).
However, I don’t know of any HS classes that have general service requirements that can be fulfilled by volunteering in the broader community such as working in a soup kitchen, community garden, etc. Most kids in our social circle do at least some of this sort of thing, but it isn’t tracked by our HS.
My kids’ HS (large affluent public) does not have a volunteer requirement. Some of the clubs might have requirements, and the school offered plenty of ways to volunteer, including a weekly bus that went to an underprivileged school each week for tutoring. One of my kids did that here and there, but overall my kids didn’t do too much volunteering. Some of their athletic teams worked some volunteer activities into the season, which is easy to do.
Like others here, I volunteer often across many types of organizations.
I was a serial volunteer when I was a SAHM, and my kids always tagged along. S attended a parochial middle school, where he had to do some volunteering - his public high school didn’t have a requirement, and he didn’t volunteer. I chose my battles with him during his teen years, and this was not a hill I chose to die on. My D attended a parochial high school with volunteer opportunities, rather than requirements - but she really enjoyed volunteering and found lots of opportunities in our church and in the community, in addition to volunteering with school groups. She continued to volunteer in college with Habitat for Humanity and Alternative Spring Break.
I have two very different children with very different personalities. If there had been a national service requirement, one would have happily complied. The other would have considered it an imposition by the government … he is not an uncaring person, he just doesn’t like to be told what he has to do.
I hate volunteer requirements through school, etc. It becomes a chore, something you check off your list because you HAVE to do it, vs you want to do it. My kids went to a Catholic elementary/middle school and they had all kinds of must dos, not to mention things to fund raise for. Public high school they also had to do community service to get some kind of recognition at graduation. And one of their college scholarships that was renewable every 4 years had a 20 hour/year requirement.
But, IMO a national service requirement 1-2 years after graduation is different. Something where they live outside the home and become immersed in a different community or serve in the military. I can see that benefit.
But in our community where having a combined two full-time worker gross salary hitting $100K makes you rich, well… we don’t have to look far to see how hard life can be. In my town, if you can buy your own groceries, you’re doing fine.
In my area, one HS has volunteer requirements and the nearby rival HS doesn’t. I work with kids at both schools and I do think the school with volunteer requirements seems to have more kids who are very active in, and furthermore enjoy, volunteerism. But the school with no requirement also seems to have a good amount of community engagement from students. Many kids here are involved with church activities, but there are so many other ways kids are involved. Often it’s personal experience that influences their volunteering choice.
A few causes that are pretty typical: food pantries, big brother/sister type groups, fund raising for all kinds of causes, animal rescues, lots of Boy Scout/Girl Scout activities, sports related volunteering, community clean up days, tutoring.
I guess that mandatory volunteering is a contradiction. But I made both of kids do it, mainly because they had very nice lives and there was absolutely no reason they shouldn’t give back in some way.
My son was happy to volunteer for any activities associated with his sport, but it was a struggle to get him to do much beyond that. He likes animals so he did messy volunteering at the animal shelter. My daughter volunteered at the local historic site for a few summers and collected schools supplies for her annual NHS obligations. I’m sorry to say neither kid is particularly altruistic though.
I personally do think that volunteering should be required of many high schoolers, despite the inherent contradiction between those ideas. The main issue I guess is, how would a school enforce this? Not every kid has time to volunteer, some kids have home obligations, some kids simply are too busy with other things, and in some communities, it would be outrageous to force kids to volunteer when they may literally have not enough food to eat, or the child must work to help support the family, etc… It is problematic.
I volunteered for many years at a college and at a historic site, but I haven’t volunteered properly for a while. (Does CC advice count as volunteering?) I need to get back into it.
This describes my entire family Neither kid volunteered too much in college (aside from athletic team activities)…it will be interesting to see what they become involved with in their adult lives.
To add, I have always been very active in volunteering. It’s just been a part of life for me so it seemed pretty normal that my child would also get involved in her community and beyond. She does a number of volunteer activities now as a young adult.
A fundamental aspect of my kids HS experience was volunteerism and service to others. This entered into why we chose the school. Our family feels we are blessed with opportunities and advantages that many if not most families don’t have access to or experience. Neither my spouse or I grew up with a lot.
The activities ranged from working in soup kitchens, tutoring developmentally challenged kids, creating a multi school charity to collect soccer equipment for kids being detained at immigration facilities, organizing a group trip to Central America to help construct homes and an extended medical mission to India in support of a medical team providing surgeries to rural communities.
It was constant, exhausting and incredibly rewarding in terms of providing perspective.
These experiences laid the groundwork for the entrepreneurial interests that defined my kids college and eventual career decisions. The company he has cofounded has managed to prove commercially successful while directly benefitting under resourced individuals. I attribute this to his experiences of working with others who are less economically fortunate and being pushed to always be as we encouraged “exhausted with purpose”.
Sorry and I don’t mean to be “preachy” but I am very proud.
Our kids volunteered because I volunteered.
I volunteered because my parents volunteered in our local, low income, community and church.
Our kids were in Scouts, so they were always out doing community services. It wasn’t a choice, but they learned how to work with adults.
As an employee of schools and hospitals/clinics, our staffs spent a lot of time “volunteering”. I didn’t have day care available when my children were young, so I dragged them everywhere with me. (Husband traveled a LOT!)
My children were considered “well-behaved”. They worked well together as a team.
By the time they were in middle school, they could run their own carnival booths.
By the time they were in high school, they could drive fork lifts (food bank taught them).
They attended a physically “large” high school that held a number of annual state meets. All of the athletes from teams were required to put in volunteer hours to help run the meets and they dragged us parents into it.
I had to take a Food Handler’s course and get a completion certificate (good for 2 years) to learn how to “bake 30 potatoes” for our volunteer role to the annual track meet! There were many of us parents stuck doing different food chores. Our kids ran the booths.
I or my kids, had to drive 30 miles to pick up donated bacon and sausages for the annual pancake breakfast.
But, overall my children were good at volunteering and continued it in college, and still sign up to help in community events. It’s just something they grew up learning, and didn’t really have a choice.
My parents always said, “God put you on this planet, for a reason: to be your best self by helping others -because you can.”
My D has done and continues to do a lot of volunteering of various kinds. It wasn’t a high school requirement, unless you were in NHS or Key Club which have service requirements.
However, I work in the nonprofit sector so it’s part of my culture, you might say, and of course, this was then something I very much expected of D and it is something we have often tried to do together.
Her volunteering hasn’t generally been the “serving the underserved” variety - for example, for several years, we volunteered together as docents at an aquarium educating visitors on ocean health, climate change, and native species and we still sometimes volunteer together at a fairy tale-themed park which hosts holiday events, where we read stories to kids, hand out cocoa and cider during winter holidays or goody bags for Halloween. We have volunteered together as ushers at community concerts. We have done volunteer work in our city restoring native plants to park areas and weeding out invasive ones. We’ve participated in several local beach clean ups.
So for us, it’s been something to do together to help our community.
Both of our boys had a volunteer component that needed to be fulfilled for their public high school. Our older son worked with ACEing Autism, which is an amazing tennis program for teens on the spectrum. Our younger son volunteered with a local food pantry, which he really enjoyed.
In college the older son joined the local volunteer rescue squad in 2020. He continues to volunteer there for at least 36 hours each month despite living 2 hours away. He was there this past weekend from Friday at 7pm until Sunday at 7pm. From the “small world” files, he works in a CC member’s community.
The younger son does a lot of community service with his college athletics team.
Just an observation. Volunteering to help those less fortunate does provide a good perspective for young people. However, it doesn’t necessarily give young people a true understanding of income disparity. In order to help young people develop an understanding of how others live, so that perhaps they will understand the ways in which others may need assistance, there needs to be some exposure to the fact that not everyone who struggles is poor.
My kids grew up in a community with a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. When they began attending a private school that was predominantly well off, they discovered that many of their classmates had only been exposed to people from similarly well off families … and people being served in soup kitchens or picking up free groceries. They didn’t have a grasp on the in-between. As a result, their classmates made assumptions based on what they knew, and they didn’t understand how “most” people live. There was kind of an assumption that everyone had what their families had, or they were poor.
Volunteering to help the poor is great, but it is important to also find ways to help young people understand the challenges many people who don’t need soup kitchens or food pantries face daily. It will allow them to empathize with the majority of their fellow citizens, so that they can understand the reasons for public programs designed to lift up those who need a helping hand to keep them out of poverty.
Agreed, but it is a start if done without the cushiness of some of the organizations kids often seek out. Sleeping on a hospital floor in rural India so a few extra kids can get procedures done or living in a tent to support the building of permanent shelters in El Salvador does provide a lasting and impactful perspective.
Not a school requirement both both kids were heavily involved in volunteerism. Both found activities where they directly served populations needing assistance. One child’s activity was done through the school and the other was not. Proud of both kids for seeking out meaningful ways to help others.
It’s definitely a start. It’s just good to keep in mind that some kids may need help understanding the many different situations in which people live, because there is a very big gap between too poor to afford food or schooling to having everything one needs & more. Just something to consider as we talk with our kids about life, I guess.
) I need to get back into it.
Neither kid volunteered too much in college (aside from athletic team activities)…it will be interesting to see what they become involved with in their adult lives.
