Volunteer Work: Why It’s a Service to Yourself by Casey Leonick

I don’t think any of us here need to be briefed on why or how community service is important. Volunteering is proven to have social, psychological, and cognitive benefits. And not just only for those who have actually done the volunteering.

Through volunteering, students become engaged in the community and are given a chance to build a relationship with the population they are serving. Psychologically, community service is known to improve mood, reduce stress, and increase self-efficiency. When asked to explain the importance of community service, one honor-roll student said, “Volunteers learn that their work makes a difference and it makes them feel good.”

Cognitively, students learn to take what they learned in school and apply it to real life problems. Say you are planting flowers around a bench in a park. How can you find out how many plants fit around a new bench? How much money would you need to raise to purchase all the flowers? How far apart should the flowers be spread so that each one will fit with an equal distance between them? How much water do they need? Just planting flowers in a visually appealing way involves math, and understanding how to keep them healthy is pure science.

Volunteering helps make students better problem solvers, which may be one of the reasons why so many schools in America have already made it mandatory. All of us here have done community service at one point or another. Maybe even crammed 30 hours in a week so we could make the deadline to get into a certain honor society. Most of us have been volunteering for years, via Boy and Girl Scouts, serving at the hospital, or helping out at church. Most of us have already reaped the benefits. Maybe we aren’t the ones who need volunteer hours to be mandatory through honor society requirements.

Instituting mandatory hours of community service school-wide will target students who wouldn’t otherwise volunteer. Typically it’s the apathetic students who tend to have lower grade-point averages and are involved in more frequent disciplinary misconducts. These are the students who could really benefit from volunteering. After some time, community service could lead to an improved mood and a new respect for their surroundings in and out of school. The gained cognitive skills could even help these students pull up their grades.

I propose we mandate at least 100 hours of community service over the course of four years. For those already volunteering, it’s a piece of cake. Even those busy, year-round athletes who are in multiple AP classes could find a few hours a month or rake up hours over the summer and still meet the requirement. Since I, for example, am pretty booked during the school year with schoolwork, extracurriculars and sports, I found I had a free period over the summer. I spent some of this free period volunteering at a vet’s office. Over the course of just one month, I had accumulated 27 hours. If I had done this every summer since entering high school, I would have exceeded the amount that was, theoretically, mandatory.

Community service hours look great on college applications because they show commitment, dedication, and compassion. In fact, service is held in such high regard that there exists a plethora of scholarships available for demonstrating such commitment (the Samuel Huntington Public Service Award and the Discover Card Tribute Award, just to name two).

With plenty of community service opportunities available, finding volunteer work in a field you enjoy is simple, and the payback is profuse for not only the community, but also the volunteer.