Look Giving and You're Golden

From first grade to eighth grade, my life revolved around Girl Scouts. While the activities associated with Girl Scouts can include selling cookies to win prizes for yourself or taking trips with your troop to spend time with your friends, it wasn't what I spent the most time in Girl Scouts doing. I spent most of my weekends going to retirement homes, helping out at food drives, or raising money for charities. 

I may not be able to speak on behalf of all my fellow troop-members, but that was my favorite part of Girl Scouts. I'm not even kidding you! I sometimes chose not to go to the social events or partake in some of the purely fun activities because that wasn't what I had truly enjoyed as a kid. I actually loved going places and doing good. It was a value that was instilled very early on- clearly- and has surely been carried on into the future. Maybe I'm just naturally one of those people who loves community service, but I have a feeling that my exposure to it early on in life helped create this interest in doing good for others in my community. 

What is saddening to me, though, is the misconception many people have about service learning and volunteer work, especially at my age. For the past several years, it was almost social suicide to not be doing some sort of service project. That awkward silence would arise when someone mentioned their plethora of sports, clubs and leadership activities...but no community service. It just wasn't common. Typically, I would consider this an amazing thing, but I've come to believe that doing community service is common for all the wrong reasons. 

Obviously, merely doing service work, for whatever reason, will have its benefits. However, as someone who truly enjoys community service for what it should be, it's frustrating to see others tarnishing the deed. I don't know how many friends of mine, last year [college application season], involved themselves in regular volunteer work. It was surprisingly very many. While that was exciting to see, I soon realized that these individuals weren't doing this because they suddenly felt compelled to improve the living conditions of those around them. Because unfortunately, as those acceptance letters came pouring in, more and more of my classmates began dropping commitment after commitment. 

Yes, community service and volunteer work has become the classic resumé-builder. It's almost a staple. There's usually a box, on most applications, which request that one lists their community service activities and commitments. It also almost seems like if you aren't doing volunteer work, you're not a good person.

I understand that applications and resumés are important and that one must do what they need to do to get the job, however the obviously selfish utilization of volunteer work for purely personal gain has made all of us teens who actually like service look pretty bad. So maybe it's time to reconsider your run-of-the-mill volunteer work purely as a resumé-builder. In my opinion, everyone has a passion, and if we all took time to find a way to exercise that passion in a way that helps others, it would bring greater benefits than being a cookie-cutter volunteer worker just to look "good".