<p>S is tall & skinny … I will use the “muscles” idea … that should do the trick! :)</p>
<p>Daughter has worked in a downtown homeless shelter for eight years. She has shopped for food, cooked the food, and serves the food to the hungry. She has seen everything you can imagine, as it is in a very depressed area. Hungry people come in all shapes and sizes. We had prepared her for the older, possibly unclean people, but she was not prepared for the children. Yes, hungry children. This is not the “holiday” type feeding, but it is the every single day of the week type, where really needy people come. She has seen fights break out between some of the men. She has been physically touched by some and flirted with by others. Many are toothless and need help cutting their food. Some have been drinking. Many are dirty and they smell. Many are not in their right minds and develope “attachments” with certain people and want them near them, or will only take the food from them. This has been good for her and she is very aware now that life doesn’t always end happily.</p>
<p>My older child - now a hs senior - had absolutely tremendous life experiences through volunteering. We didn’t expect that, it just happened. It’s so important for kids to really get out into the community, cross economic and racial and educational and geographic boundaries. It’s a cliche, but it’s true.</p>
<p>I have been in key club for a year but my school honestly does not do a lot of commnuity service. What would be something good for me to do no my own?
Something out of the ordinary?</p>
<p>One DD volunteered at an exotic animal preserve, the things she did that really made the most difference were the office things- she got to work with some of the animals, but what helped the preserve the most was computer work and filing etc.</p>
<p>DD in Berkeley has done volunteer work at a homeless shelter, I think she enjoyed working with the kids and it was good for the kids, not sure it made any big difference though</p>
<p>It depends on where your talents and interests lie. My daughter took advanced art classes in high school. The teacher downloaded digital photos of orphans. The high school kids painted small (5x7?) portraits of the children on mortar board which were sent to the orphanage. The orphanage said the portraits were highly prized by the kids that had so few personal belongings.</p>
<p>So what do you like to do? Play 40s music for dementia people? Finger paint with nursery school kids? Write letters to soldiers who may not be getting any other mail? Bake muffins for shut ins? Try finding something that you already enjoy doing and then connect it with your community.</p>
<p>My kids always found community service activities that they enjoyed. Son1 taught swimming to disabled kids and was camp counselor at special camps. Son2 did the same, and also worked on theater projects for the handicapped. Both guys worked with inner city kids, teaching them to swim, as well coaching them in soccer, lacrosse, basketball and other sports. S3 was a volunteer firefighter and EMC, and worked for the Obama campaign and the DNC. He also worked at chess camps for inner city kids. He also has been involved with activities for kids with cancer, and cancer research and fund raising. S4 has been working in soup kitchens since middle school and is heavily involved in church activities. S5 is also deeply committed to church activities that gives him natural entry into many community services. He will find something I am sure, in the next few years. All 5 of them have worked for Habitat for Humanity. None of them had any trouble finding community service work. I have been involved in very few of their community service work.</p>
<p>My daughter got hooked up with a college-run summer camp program for kids in various low income and public housing neighborhoods in the Boston area mostly ethnic and immigrant communites. The summer before her senior year in high school, she researched and developed a hands on math-enrichment program (using card games, etc.) and taught nine classes each week to 90 boys and girls ranging in age from 9 to 13. She got grant funding and continued on with the same organizationf or several more summers.</p>
<p>I would say that it was both rewarding and challenging (to say the least). She was the only high school kid teaching in the program, so she had to step it up in what was a sometimes frustrating endeavor, even for the college kids.</p>
<p>a friend and I coached a youth soccer team in high school
I spent a spring break doing Katrina relief in Biloxi, MS
I put hundreds of hours into local tutoring around my college
I am starting a year (or, until I get a long term job offer) of service with AmeriCorps, that focuses on tutoring and mentoring</p>
<p>=)</p>
<p>My son received his HAM radio operator’s license at age 12 and volunteered with the local radio club for many years. He became part of the team that provided emergency communications for major fund raising events (The Walk For Hunger, MS Walk, etc.). The other HAMs were mostly decades older and generously gave their time whenever disasters struck or charities asked for their assistance They were powerful role models for my son as they incorporated him into their team. I am so grateful to them for the confidence they had in my son and the lessons they taught him about team work and community involvement.
For my son it was a wonderful way to use his techie interests to provide an essential service.</p>
<p>Volunteer firefighting/rescue. But you usually need to be 16.</p>
<p>EMT certificate and assisting as an EMT Friday nights in his Senior HS year.</p>
<p>I find it interesting the way just being a part of your community is now labeled “community service”. Participating in PTA, older kids coaching and reffing younger kids teams, helping in a community or church cleanup - I really have a problem with people counting credits for doing these things.</p>
<p>I also have an issue with high schools having an hours of “volunteer work” requirement. If it is required it is not voluntary. If you are doing it because you want to be involved you shouldn’t be keeping a scorecard. And if it gives you something to take away - all the better.</p>
<p>gusaspara–for some people this is a normal part of being in a community. Other people have to be taught, if not by their parents, then by their school or encouraged by their peers. Our area seems to have a lot of fundraisers/benefits organized totally by students to benefit disease research & cure, or the children’s hospital, and who knows how many kids participated just because their friends did? And thus learned the joy of helping others.</p>
<p>My S who is not naturally very social has enjoyed working as an exhibit interpreter at the local science/natural history museum. It has helped his speaking skills & interaction with others, and it’s in his natural area of interest.</p>
<p>Another thing he has done is help at an organization that rebuilds & repairs donated computers for non-profits.</p>
<p>And he likes both of the above more than the hours he put in picking up trash by the side of the road for a 7th grade requirement! But still, that was a learning experience for him, besides making the road look a LOT better. :)</p>
<p>My D did informal service in high school, including peer tutoring, free babysitting for spouses of deployed military personnel, and shoveling snow for the elderly lady next door. Probably most of it would not have “counted” in schools with a requirement for service, but she did things that were important to her, just to help out. Her NHS chapter did require service, but they always had organized activities such as clothing drives and such, enough to meet the relatively small requirement.</p>
<p>Now she works about six hours a week at a soup kitchen in her college town. She was having a hard time fitting everything in this semester and decided to give up a fun EC in order to still have time for the shelter. And last summer, between freshman and sophomore years, she was a short-term youth camp worker in Lithuania with Volunteers for Peace. She was mostly just looking for an affordable way to spend some time in the Baltic region when she committed to it, but it turned out to be a very fulfilling experience. And she got to make good use of her emerging Russian skills and ended up being sort of a liaison between the camp staff and the other volunteers because the person they were supposed to work with got sick, and the replacement spoke Lithuanian and Russian but not much English.</p>
<p>thanks these are all great suggestions.
i want to do something the exptic preserve center
but idk were to look for these programs</p>
<p>Ds1, who wanted to learn more about outdoors stuff, volunteered with a search and rescue group (for youths 14+). Ds2 who was more animal inclined raised 2 puppies for Guiding Eyes for the Blind (with me as the legal raiser on papper, age issue). Both learned a lot, esp. that they can make a difference, however small.</p>
<p>After several students were arrested in a fight at S’s high school, son got certified as a facilitator in a nonviolence program. He and I were both interested in the program, and we paid our money to go out of state to get the training. We tried to get other parents, students, teachers to do this – at the parent organization’s expense – but we were the only ones who did this. </p>
<p>Afterward, S facilitated workshops for the community service organization that he became president of. He had been involved in the organization throughout h.s. – including as veep, but this was the first time that a student in the organization had actually started a program with it.</p>
<p>I also helped with the program, but he and I would split the duties, taking turns facilitating parts of the workshops, and taking turns designing the curricula. S designed the flyers. During Dec. vacation of his senior year, we facilitated 20 hours of workshops for about 12 people including adults as well as teens.</p>
<p>S also was a junior counselor for the HOBY leadership program, a weekend regional youth leadership program that he had participated in after his soph year in h.s.</p>
<p>The summer after senior year, S had primary responsibility for designing and serving as lead counselor in a week-long leadership camp for about 50 high school students.</p>
<p>As a h.s. junior, S and another student had designed a project that raised about $1,000 for tsunami victims. It was the first time in recent memory that the entire school had been involved in a service project. S decided to raise money when he saw on TV the devastation caused by the tsunami. He called one of his friends and they started brainstorming fundraising ideas. Their initial idea – a teacher talent show – was shot down by the school system’s administration, and his friend gave up on fundraising. S, though, worked with another student to create a project that was acceptable to the administrators. </p>
<p>It was a penny war, a fund raiser that is well known in some places, but wasn’t in his school. S and his friend got NHS to help with the project, too. The class that raised the most money got to have a member of the class pie the principal, something everyone thoroughly enjoyed especially since the principal hadn’t previously been known for those kind of antics.</p>
<p>Now a soph in college, S continues being heavily involved in community service, and just finished participating in dance marathon, something he also had helped organize. He also has helped organize a hunger banquet, organizes monthly campus-wide service activities, and also frequently volunteers on weekends feeding homeless people. Service is an important part of his life just as it is an important part of mine. In addition to dancing, serving food and doing similar things, S uses his art skills to create publicity campaigns for service programs, including creating slide shows, Facebook pages, and similar things.</p>
<p>“I also have an issue with high schools having an hours of “volunteer work” requirement. If it is required it is not voluntary. If you are doing it because you want to be involved you shouldn’t be keeping a scorecard. And if it gives you something to take away - all the better.”</p>
<p>I have no problem with high schools requiring service. While my kids would have done CS even without the requirement since CS is something our family values, and everyone does --that’s not the case for many students.</p>
<p>Unfortunately there are many families that think that CS is only done to avoid jail time. There also are parents who never think of helping others, so aren’t going to teach their kids about CS.</p>
<p>To learn that one can make a difference in others’ lives is a reward unto itself, and I think that schools that require CS are doing students a favor.</p>
<p>When I taught college, I required that each student do a couple of hours of community service of their choice, and just write a couple of paragraphs about what they learned from the experience. The most frequent comment I got was from students who said that they had expected CS to be boring, but when they did it, they learned how enjoyable it was to help others.</p>
<p>I don’t think that requiring students to do CS makes them dislike it any more than requiring students to read books causes students to hate reading.</p>
<p>In high school, I organized and shelved books at my temple’s library and helped with summer programs at a local museum. My sister tutored a junior high school student once a week and helped organize and coach a Special Olympics figure skating team.</p>