When it comes to helping those in need, help is help. It doesn’t matter if it’s forced or voluntary. It is hard to get people to give time out of their busy schedules to go out and volunteer. As a result, according to Volunteerhub.com, over one fifth of non profit organizations struggle to find volunteers and only about 60% of volunteers return for a second time.
It may be argued that the whole point of doing community service is to help out voluntarily from the good of your heart. And while that would be nice it is very clear that is not a good enough reason for most people to want to volunteer. People have busy schedules and many feel they are too busy or sometimes even too good to go and help these non profit organizations.
This is why it is crucial that some groups of people are forced to go out and volunteer so that these organizations can get enough help to achieve their goals of reaching as many people as possible.
It doesn’t matter if the people want to be there or not, as long as they are working it’s still helping people get the help they need.
People who have committed crimes are often required to complete a large amount of community service. The average length of service was 34 hours for misdemeanor cases and 55 hours for felony cases according to the Fines and Fees Justice Center. While they are not voluntarily doing it, it is still benefiting the community and turning something bad like a crime into something good through helping non profit organizations. While it is not what we want to hear, it is true that even if someone really hates helping people or does not want to help out with community service, if they are forced to and then in turn serve the community. It’s just as valid as someone who is regularly helping out doing community service. It counts either way.
Many students would never do community service either if they were not forced to do so for their graduation credits. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 64% of public schools in the United States require students to perform some community service in order to graduate.
This is a huge help in temporarily stocking these organizations with enough support to fully function. That’s 10.8 million kids across the country helping these organizations run some of their biggest events according to Volunteerhub. Continuing with the student side of things. Being forced into community service is a great chance for people to get an experience with communist service which could make them more likely to want to do community service in the future. More than half of the people who do community service once want to return and do it again according to Volunteerhub.com. This goes to show that sometimes people just need to experience something in order to be motivated to do it on their own.
Helping out and doing community service is also beneficial for those working in it. Working in a community can have mental and physical benefits and even if you are forced into helping out, you will experience them no matter what according to Keyclub.org.
Mentally helping out in the community makes you feel good and you get satisfaction of knowing you helped someone out. Physically it gets you out into the world and depending on what you’re doing can even be good exercise. Even if you aren’t voluntarily helping out you will still see those benefits.
It’s called community service because you are serving the community. So as long as it is doing just that, it counts no matter if it’s forced or voluntary. Sure from a moral standpoint you could argue it means more when people do it voluntarily but at the end of the day, if the job gets done it gets done and that counts no matter what.
