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Encouraging Community Service
A Lesson in Perspective and Personal Discovery
By Laura Paul
As young volunteers get older, parents may see an increase in the intensity with which their child pursues community service.
Jesse White, an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer and coordinator of the Faces of Homelessness Speakers Bureau in Washington, D.C., works closely with high school and college students active in homelessness issues. She says students serve at soup kitchens as well as at homeless shelters. They might also go to Capitol Hill and talk to the representatives about different pieces of legislation that are coming up for debate.
"I've also seen a lot of late-high school, college-age students really get heavily involved in activism and advocacy by organizing letter-writing campaigns to representatives, by organizing call-in days to representatives, by hosting hunger and homelessness awareness weeks [and] by organizing educational events," White says.
Whether students organize rallies or volunteer at a soup kitchen, they feel plugged into the larger society as opposed to the smaller social circles within their high schools or colleges. While parents often want to shelter their children from these issues, they also need to balance that with giving their children a taste of the real world with all of its complexities, inequalities and heartache.
"A lot of the students we work with that come from upper middle-class, suburban communities don't really realize the extent of how many people are homeless and how many different kinds of people are poor and homeless and using various services," White says. "I think a lot of times they have a particular stereotype in their head of homeless people [that they] are all white, middle-aged drunks, and when they volunteer and they get to actually meet people who are homeless, they see there are a lot of women and children who are homeless."
