One warm afternoon when I was volunteering at my church’s annual Bible school and herding children to lunch, I heard a friend mutter a statement that has stuck with me.
“I’d rather kill myself than have to go to Kids Against Hunger this Saturday.”
He isn’t a bad person. He doesn’t hate helping others. But he was onto something. Somewhere along the line, community service has become a measurable metric with the sole purpose of being plastered onto a job or academic resume.
Schools and institutions set volunteer quotas to give students credit, but in doing so, they remove the intention behind the act. Motivation for a true impact disappears, and volunteering becomes an empty act to show the world you’re worth hiring for this job or admitting to that college.
The absence of good intentions
As institutions started to weigh community service as a display of character development, our generation has resorted to “hour-farming.” I’ve often heard my parents and peers list numbers of necessary volunteer hours, the supposed bare minimum to get into a competitive school. But not one acknowledged the intention that should go behind these hours. Students begin to overlook quality for quantity, searching out the highest yield for the lowest effort.
For instance, I used to volunteer at a library that offered me an hour per book review I wrote for them. I churned out quick 200-word book reviews, gaining masses of hours. But I gained absolutely nothing. In comparison, my church volunteering – though fewer hours – is fulfilling. Leading fundraisers and taking care of children during Bible school are all experiences I hold dear to my heart.
I fear my generation is losing the meaning of community service. Prestigious awards like the President’s Volunteer Service Award can become the bare minimum in certain competitive environments as community service opportunities become sit-at-home endeavors.
The relationship between student and community has become extractive. You donate time, you rack up points.
You might ask, so what? Even if intentions are askew, such mass volunteering still gets necessary community work done. But that assumes the work is substantial.
Serving to improve the community
Today, teens gravitate toward easy opportunities often advertised by shallow, student-led nonprofits, like a digital magazine that offers an hour for every poem you submit. True community-beneficial work is overlooked in the face of the easier path.
We need to step away from selfish community service and learn to value the concept for what it is, rather than try to find loopholes. Go out there. Feed the homeless. Help out at that local church. Shelve books for the library.
But don’t sit at home, doing random tasks for empty nonprofits, believing in the ruse of the necessary 200 volunteer hours to get into college. Do the community service so that you can further the goodness inside of you and improve your community.
Anya Joseph is a member of the class of 2028 at Foothill High School in Pleasanton.
Editor’s note: This story is part of the annual Mosaic Journalism Program for Bay Area high school students, an intensive course in journalism. Students in the program report and photograph stories under the guidance of professional journalists.