Don’t let your teen Volunteer away their valuable time this Summer
It’s summer and teens are looking for volunteer opportunities, but be careful and don’t let them volunteer away their valuable time. Yes I know many of them are seeking to build their resume for college applications, look good for scholarships, and earn community service awards, honors, and badges but help them choose their options wisely, after all they can kinda volunteer anywhere, if they are deliberate about it.
Rethinking Volunteering
When teens volunteer, they are giving their valuable time. They only have 168 hours a week. Between classes, studying, sports, extra curricular activities, SAT prep, college tours, college essays, college applications, lessons, etc. there is little time to waste. How they volunteer their time needs to be carefully thought out.
Many students, through the pressure from parents, the encouragement of counselors, or the persuasion of teachers sign up for any and everything just to rack up community service hours in order to beef up their college resume, earn a community service award, compete for scholarships, or get a gold seal or cord for graduation. I have literally seen schools or 4H give .1 community service hours for bringing a single can of food for a food drive so students will buy a 12 pack of Top Ramen for $3 to get 1.2 hours of community service . What is that teaching or what are they learning? Generosity maybe…..but not anything really applicable to their future college or career goals, especially if parents buy it vs them collecting the food donations from the community via a drive they physically organize.
Personally, if I was reviewing applications I would rather see high quality volunteering that is related to the potential major or that is teaching a student something about what they don’t want to do in the future, rather than a high number of service hours doing really random things.
Why?
Because once students get to college, they have very little extra time to change course, experiment, and take risks. Once they graduate college, and especially if they have loans to repay, they have very little time to meander. In high school, they are living at home and volunteering is a chance to try out any and everything they may be interested in to see what clicks.
Examples of Volunteering
Below are four examples of volunteering and how you can make them a good use of your time when it comes to college and career exploration verses just doing them to rack up hours.
Mindless Volunteering
Many students rack up volunteer hours standing at an open house holding a sign or pointing left in a parking lot at a school sports event. Yes, volunteers are needed for these mindless tasks, someone has to do it, but if a student is going to do a volunteer job like this, what can they learn from it? Can it help them test out if they want a job standing for hours at a time. For example, many pharmacists stand all day. Maybe they are outside in 100 degree weather or the rain, do they want a job outside in construction or engineering year round? If they are going to volunteer doing a job like this, how can they do it well? Can they talk to people at the open house and ask them if they need directions and make them feel welcome and seen to get practice with social skills and customer service? Maybe it will help them realize they don’t want a job talking to the public. If they are directing traffic, can they find a way to make the line move faster, more efficient, and practice logistics or solve a problem of some sort so that for the next event, things run smoother? Maybe this will help them learn if they enjoy taking initiative and may want to improve upon something in a future job as a manager.
Volunteering for a Cause
Volunteering for causes is great, but is it a cause that pertains to something the teen actually cares about, wants to learn more about, or plans to do something with in the future? I have seen a lot of students rack up a ton of hours doing weekly beach cleanups before they hit the beach with their friends. While this is great for the environment and the sea life and community thanks them, they really are not learning anything. If this is their passion and future area of interest for work, how can they take it two or three steps further? Can they be the one to organize a large community event that produces a public art piece to showcase how much pollution happens in a single weekend to educate the public about the need for protecting wildlife and recycling properly? Can they do research about organizations that are raising funds to remove plastic from the ocean and start a fundraiser to contribute to their work? Or more locally, can they raise funds for additional trash cans at the beach to entice people to properly dispose or recycle their trash? Again these are all great ideas but if the environment is not their thing, they are kinda wasting their valuable time and could be finding unique things to do in their area of interest which may be equally worthy and needed.
Volunteering as a leader
Many organizations advertise for volunteers on an ongoing basis like youth sports. This can be great for building leadership, public speaking, organization, planning, teaching, responsibility, etc. In addition to sports teens can volunteer at summer camps and take a mini vacation while they volunteer teaching anything they know how to do. They should not just sign up randomly for something that they see available, but rather actively go seek volunteering somewhere leading or teaching something they are super passionate about. Why? Because it will tell them if it is something they could charge money to teach in the future as a side hustle or could spark some new career ideas. For example if they play guitar, they could volunteer teaching at a church, a retirement home, a hospital, a preschool, etc. They don’t have to be really good, they just have to be better than those they are teaching.
They can also start offering free classes or programming in the park on their own. Yes that counts. They don’t have to officially volunteer in the community through an established organization, they can story their own FREE something or other. They can just have students who participate sign a collective letter at the end of the class with total hours donated to the community.
Think outside the box on this one. No, hanging with family does not count as volunteering, it needs to be something open to the community so if organized without an organization, it should also be advertised and that can be attached to the signed letter. Colleges are not going to track down every little thing a student t lists. Community service can happen organically but ways can be found to track it in a formal way. If a high school absolutely demands it come from an organization, see if something the student is anffliated with will be an umbrella to oversee it, like a church or scouts. For example if a student volunteers weekly driving a neighbor to her dialysis appointment, they could ask if the church or medical clinic would write you a letter saying they volunteer through them to do this. This would be the same as signing up with an organization and being a driver, but doing it organically.
Interning at a Business
Students don’t have to just look for posted internships, they can go propose an idea to a company. For example, if they notice locally that a new business or organization does not have a social media page, or even if they do, and the student thinks they help improve it, they can approach the business and tell them what they can do for them.
Many businesses would like help but are busy so they don’t have time to advertise for interns or supervise then. If a student writes them a letter, sends them an email, or stops by and shows them, not tells them, what they can do for them, they may be surprised just how many may accept their help or even hire them if not at first, down the line after they’ve their value.
So let’s say a student sees a local Humane Society is doing posts only every few months on their Facebook page, a student could visit the pages of several other Humane Societies and get some ideas and then craft two weeks worth of posts for the Humane Society and send them to them in an email, a letter, or stop by. Showing is much more powerful than walking in and asking if the company needs an intern. Regardless, this approach still let’s students try a real job that people get paid to do.
Where to Volunteer
Summer is the perfect time to volunteer but the closer a student can align their future goals and interests to how they give their time the more they can test drive what they like and don’t like about jobs and industries. I always say the things we would do for fee are often the things we should get paid to do full time. Yep…checks out, I am constantly doing career vision day and night and providing unsolicited info to any and everyone who will listen.
I probably volunteer more of my time yearly than time I get paid for which is also why I started to is substack so if you enjoyed it please subscribe and watch for my flash sale tomorrow Friday, June 13th.
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