Volunteerism in Teens

        The ultimate reward in life is the thankful smile from a stranger as you hand them a plateful of food at a soup kitchen, the obvious improvement of a once trash littered road through your town, or the kind touch of an elderly man or women as you listen to their life story at a nursing home. These experiences have been referred to as “giving back to the community” and “an easy way having credits on your college applications”, but only one name has stayed the same, that is community service. From the moment you enter elementary school to the day you graduate high school, there is an expected amount of hours each student should participate in community service. Though programs arise every year to promote volunteering, less people throughout the United States would even consider giving up some of their Saturday’s to contribute. This needs to change urgently so that young people and people of any age group know and understand that community service is not a thing of the past.

        From an excerpt of the book Millennials Rising written by Neil Howe and William Strauss, I found statistics about the growth of community service opportunities in high schools from the years 1984 to 1999. These statistics stated that schools offering any kind of service program went from 17 to 83 percent and another that acclaimed that sharing the learning opportunities from contributing to the community grew from 9 to 46 percent. If these numbers sky-rocketed that much twenty years ago there is no excuse that we cannot take community service from being mandatory to graduate and enrolling in colleges to something that should fill our Saturday from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. Young adults who help the community and learn by doing are the people that our future as a society depends on. A young boy named John Prueter, a 13-year-old seventh grader, spends his afternoons after school spending time with elderly at a local nursing home in Hampton Township. In 2008, the Detroit News had a story called “Volunteering Opens Teen’s Eyes to Nursing” about John and his contributions to his town. He helps with any tasks at the nursing home that are needed while still spends numerous amounts of times with multiple elderly. From his experiences at this nursing home, John states that once he gets to high school he wants to get into the nursing field and then enroll in a program to endure nursing as a career.