One time my dad gave me and my sister $20 dollars and told me to go get a gift for my mom’s birthday. Of course I did what he asked me to, but as I watched her smiling as she opened the gift, I did not feel good about myself. It did not feel like the gift was coming from the good of my heart. Gift giving is not that different from community service. If someone is told to do it, it loses all genuine meaning behind it.
Community service is a direct product of a person’s desire and passion to see the world around themselves become a better place. They are willing to give up their time for nothing material in return, just to help out their community.
When a student or anyone for that matter is required to volunteer, whether it be for a grade or benefits, it becomes about themselves.
In 2018, President Donald Trump enacted a change in the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services policy that allowed states to require work or community engagement in order to qualify for medicare. Policies like these can actually hurt some nonprofits.
The policy of the National Council for Nonprofits (NCN), the largest network of nonprofits in North America, is against the concept of mandatory volunteerism. This is because these requirements, “impose increased costs, burdens, and liabilities on nonprofits by an influx of coerced individuals,” as the policy states.
“Few if any of the mandatory volunteerism bill sponsors ever ask whether nonprofits in their communities can handle an onslaught of hundreds or thousands of individuals showing up on nonprofit doorsteps for the purpose of doing time rather than doing good,” the NCN website states.
The system Lakota previously used promoted “doing time” to just get the 15 hours over with. Community service should be part of the curriculum but not in the mandated way it was before, because it is not a good deed if it is harming the nonprofit.
In 2013, EducationWeek reported that mandatory volunteering increases engagement in the short term. But once students completed the required hours, they were less likely to volunteer overall.
This diluted form of volunteering does not resonate well whatsoever with students and leads to the teaching inadvertently having an inverse effect.
The way community service is taught needs an adjustment, because volunteers are a necessity for a number of organizations working to make a positive impact.
The focus should be on building students’ knowledge of nonprofits, nurturing their ability to empathize with those around them, and emphasizing community service as a part of their civic duty as Americans. Making it a graded assignment lets students do the bare minimum just to get the grade they want.
In fact that is exactly what a 2013 study on student service learning (SSL) by Melissa Cloyd found.
“When SSL was required as part of school programming, students were perceived as viewing it as homework instead of as an opportunity to make differences in their communities,” wrote Cloyd.
She cited it as a strong reason to not implement SSL into school districts.
These requirements ruin the experience of willful volunteerism. School mandated volunteering takes away the most valuable part of volunteering. Students do not get to truly experience the satisfaction one gains from helping others if they are just trying to maintain their A in government class.
Educating and fostering the value of community service in students will build lifelong volunteers who truly want to do a good deed and support their communities.
Volunteering is a fundamental part of society, but it is also a choice. Mandating it takes all of the selflessness out of the act.
