Volunteering pays off for high school students

written by Linda Davis, CEO of CVNL, taken from Marin Independent Journal, Sunday June 27th 2010, page A 29

Regarding your June 17 story "Novato may require service for high school students," I believe that requiring volunteer service of high school students is the right way to go for Novato, as well as all public schools in Marin.

As a parent of two Novato High graduates and the CEO of the Center for Volunteer and Nonprofit Leadership (Marin’s Volunteer Center) I can tell you that in the majority of cases youth start volunteering because their parents ‘require’ them to or their school or service club did, not because they decided on their own.

Often people need that first experience to help them develop a real sense of the value of volunteering and a sense that volunteering is something they actually want to do again. Volunteering changes lives, broadens experience and builds compassion and empathy.

Our family went to New Orleans after Katrina and while our boys had volunteered prior to that, it was this experience that sparked the start of their involvement in politics and social justice. They were in high school at the time and both wrote their college admission essay about the experience.

Requiring students to complete community service to graduate is a great way to introduce service and philanthropy, creating life long civic engagement. Students are required to take classes across a variety of disciplines. Do you think that students would take Math, Language, and Science if it were not required? Without requirements students would not receive the benefit of the information from subjects or classes that they are not inclined to take. If the goal of education is to help mold students into well-rounded human beings, shouldn't community service be a contributor to the molding process?

There is much documented about the value of volunteerism, such as-- students who participated in school required community service were 22 percentage points more likely to graduate from college than those that did not and were more likely to have improved their Reading, Math, Science and History scores. (Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning Engagement). It is also documented that the younger a person starts volunteering and giving, the more likely they are to donate as adults.

By participating in the life of our community, students are actively improving the quality of that life—whether it is helping to coach a little league baseball team, caring for and feeding animals, visiting a homebound older person, restoring native vegetation, or painting the exterior of a child care center, all these activities add meaning to our personal lives and make a huge contribution to the vibrancy and strength of our community.

At the Center We believe that meaningful service to the community is a defining characteristic of a healthy and productive society. Nonprofits have always relied heavily on volunteers, but in these challenging times, people power has become particularly vital.

Log onto our website, www.cvnl.org any time during the year and access hundreds of service opportunities in Marin’s nonprofits.

We would be happy to work with all of the schools in Marin to assist with volunteer opportunities.

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