Curtis WestbayConsistency, Impact, but above all else, Relevance
A strong service activity has all three.
Consistency just means that a student commits to a cause over time. Whether itās something that a student does every week, every month, or every summer, sticking with a service activity shows resilience and patience, consistency and responsibility.
Impact just means that a student commits to making a real difference. This is not an easy thing to achieve. Impactful community service helps a cause or a person in a way that changes the outcome for the better.
In this post, though, letās talk about relevance. If a community service activity is relevant to someone, itās something they care about deeply, personally. Itās something for which their heart breaks, and they are intrinsically driven to do something about it. The need might be a symptom of a problem that is too big to solve individually, but that doesnāt mean that the volunteer has given up hopeā it means too much to them to quit.
The problem consumes them, emotionally and intellectually. As you can probably tell, not just everyone looks outside of themselves in this way. People like this are uncommon, and so students who engage in volunteering in so deep and meaningful a way are also uncommon. In a sense, this kind of commitment really canāt be faked. This kind of commitment is the byproduct of a servantās heart. Compassion can be cultivated, but it canāt be faked.
So, to start, a student should just find a thing they care about. If they donāt care about anything, thereās nothing wrong with them. A lot of people donāt care about a problem before they encounter it firsthand. Then having come face to face with it, the seed of compassion is planted firmly in their heart.
For me, mundane as it sounds, the catalyst for volunteerism was talking to my grandmother. Even as a teen, I could tell how lonely her life was after my grandfather died. She lived about 400 meters from the junior high school I attended, so I would spend time with her after school every day until my mother got off work and could drive us home. My grandmother would recount the detailed events of her day, no matter how quotidian and unremarkable they were. It seemed like she had been waiting, every day, just to have someone to share her life with again. It seemed so strange, as it was hard to see the love that my grandmother and grandfather had for one another before his passing. And I was touched by her honesty, by the way she told me how much it meant that I would come and sit with her for a little while after school, just to talk about the day.
It would be perverse to assume that I got nothing out of the daily exchanges, though. I grew to admire the qualities that my grandmother showed, and I tried to be more like her. When she did leave the house, it was to help others, even in her seventies. She would go visit other elderly people just about every day in the winter months, so that she could use her accountancy skills to help them complete their tax filings at no charge. My grandmother had a magnanimity about her that made me see the extent to which care, love, and support were contagious within a community. I have often fallen short of her example, but I have never forgotten about it. Every day presents a new opportunity to try again to live up to that standard.
In high school, I would go to a nursing home in my hometown with my grandmother to chat and play board games with seniors. Sometimes, they were just as lively and delighted and sharp as my grandmother. Sometimes, they were detached and lifeless. But in each of them, I saw humanity because of the way my grandmother treated them. Sometimes, from those detached folks, I would get a glimmer of enthusiasm, like when one nursing home resident told me he had missed me out of the blue. It didnāt seem like he cared, but apparently, he looked forward to our Sunday afternoon routine of watching TV, wordlessly, in the recreation room. And that was about all he ever said to me. Maybe thatās why I remember it so clearly.
Throughout college, I still volunteered at the nursing home from time to time. Then, as a teacher in Arizona, I was a faculty adviser to a singing club, a sort of impromptu choir for vocalists at my school. The group was led by some of the most kindhearted students I have ever known, and once every couple of weeks, we would all meet at a nursing home, where they would sing songs and play the piano to an audience of Alzheimerās patients that seemed pretty oblivious to their performance. Service is a sacrifice, and most of the time, it probably wonāt feel very rewarding. Of course, then there are those glimmers of precious humanity, of the change youāre realizing through your effort, of the strength of a community that youāve helped build.
However it is that students care, the value is that theyāre learning to care. Whatever can be said about the college application and the role that service plays in a studentās success in it, thatās not what service is about. Through the travails and the setbacks and the efforts and the progress, they will be building character that can withstand the challenges of a college classroom, a career, and of a world that often feels cruel. However students care, if they care in their own way, they will be better for it.