Staying Home for Spring Break? Use Your Time to Make an Impact!
February 26, 2010 | Megan
Can’t afford to travel somewhere exotic for your Spring Break, but still want to make a difference?
There are so many service trips on campus that require lots of money to cover transportation costs. The trips are appealing because it means traveling and experiencing a different habitat we’ve never seen before. Most of these trips are volunteer-service based.
If you really want to volunteer this spring break, wouldn’t it leave more of an impact to help out closer to home? The appeal of working together with a group of friends as a team is still there. In fact, more of your friends will likely be able to participate in a local project, rather than spending hundreds of bucks on traveling expenses.
Accomplishing a project to better the community you live in will bond you with your team, and enable you to do something outside the norm of your everyday tasks. Every community has its problems, the key is to focus on the issues in your own neighborhood that stand out as areas that need improvement. See if there are already opportunities to get involved, think nature clean-ups, projects to re-store damaged houses or schools, or organizations that meet up in your community.
If anyone has yet to make an effort, you have the power to take the initiative, identify the problem, and start a group to address the issue yourself. As college students, we may feel powerless. Financially unstable, inexperienced, and often not taken seriously, it’s easy to feel like the underdogs. We have to prove that we are capable.
Our inexperience and youth can work to our advantage. We have more energy and enthusiasm than most middle-aged people. If we want to make something happen, we have the power to do so!
It also works in our advantage that we are stronger and physically more able than many service based adult organizations.
One particular international organization, Kiwanis International, is a community service based group that gets involved in helping out in any way possible. College students can really help groups like Kiwanis, whose members are aging and may need a hand in some of the physical projects that can require lifting and being on your feet for long hours. Kiwanis contains about 8,000 different clubs in 96 different countries, so it’s likely there is one near you! They sponser nearly 150,000 service projects each year. There are projects like building playgrounds and libraries for elementary schools, as well as volunteering at nursing homes, homeless shelters, and soup kitchens. You can pick and choose, depending on which projects and causes you are interested in volunteering for.
Kiwanis is great with organizing events and pin-pointing areas that need a helping hand. The group could really use young adults to follow through on service ideas and make things happen! It’s worth looking locally for a group like Kiwanis, so you can use your spring break time at home wisely. (As opposed to watching MTV’s Spring Break and wishing you were there!)
You can find the closest Kiwanis service group here.
great ideas for community service!