Community service
Research shows that individual traits like personality and religiosity, combined with organizational settings, play a significant role in fostering long-term volunteerism.
[7] Student volunteering, particularly in Western English-speaking countries, is driven by altruistic and career-oriented motivations, highlighting a strong culture of volunteerism among young people.
[9] Some educational jurisdictions in the United States require students to perform community service hours to graduate from high school.
[10] If a student in high school is taking an Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) course, community service is often needed.
Starting in 2010, Danish high school students receive a special diploma if they complete at least 20 hours of voluntary work.
When compared to other forms of experiential learning like internships and cooperative education, it is similar in that it is student-centered, hands-on and directly applicable to the curriculum.
"[21] Professor Freddy Cardoza defines community service-learning as "a pedagogy (or a specific teaching-learning approach) that has few lectures, and is a more interactive hands on educational strategy which provides students with instruction while leading them through meaningful community service experiences and engaging them in personal reflection on those experiences in order to build character and to teach problem-solving skills and civic responsibility.
These are: redistributing power to marginalized groups of people; developing meaningful partnerships with community members/partners and those in the classroom; and, approaching service learning through the lens of making impactful social change.
Instead it is to address how students can become agents of social change and dismantle the institutions that allow for inequalities to exist in the communities they serve in the first place.
[26] Since reforms in the past 100 years haven't seemed to work, educational leaders and schools have made critical service learning into more grassroots type movements.
People convicted of a crime may be required to perform community service or to work for agencies in the sentencing jurisdiction either entirely or partially as a substitution of other judicial remedies and sanctions, such as incarceration or fines.
In the United Kingdom, community service is now officially referred to by the Home Office as more straightforward compulsory unpaid work.
Many institutions require and/or give incentives to students or employees alike to volunteer their time to community service programs.
From volunteering to participating in such charity events like walks or runs, institutes continue the practice or require their employees or students to grow in camaraderie while giving back to various communities.
The program is a service partnership aimed at providing support and assistance to Baltimore City Schools (BCS) while providing faculty and staff an avenue for community service, offering their talents to the city's youth and improving the administrative and educational capacities of the area's school system.
[28] Some institutes even give their students or employees a guaranteed number of days or weeks of leave for certain acceptable community service programs.
"Although beneficence and good works are also important secular goals, religion remains one of the major motivating forces behind community service.
These groups and churches reach out by holding Vacation Bible Schools for children, hosting Red Cross blood drives, having fall carnivals, or offering free meals.
"[33] Some non-governmental (NGO) community service organizations were founded by Christians seeking to put their beliefs into practice.
Today, Samaritan's Purse reaches millions of people across the globe by providing aid such as disaster relief, medical assistance, and child care.
His tent meetings gathered crowds of drunkards, prostitutes and thieves[36] who eventually became the first "soldiers" in the army, which has grown to 1,442,388 members in 126 countries.
[37] The Salvation Army's motto is "Doing the Most Good" and does so by providing aid such as shelter, food, clothing, spiritual training and disaster relief.
Founded by Millard Fuller, its vision is to "...put God's love into action by bringing people together to build homes, communities and hope".
An example of providing a service without spending money would be, "visiting the sick, being an attendant to the blind, collection and distribution of donations, constructing houses (for the homeless), schools (for the poor children), orphanages, retirement centers, nursing homes, hospitals and working in the Nongovernment Islamic Organizations that need volunteers due to limited resources"(Sulaiman).
Because community service outlets vary, those who serve are exposed to many different kinds of people, environments, and situations.
While simply performing community service is valuable to the recipients, those serving often find it beneficial to pause and reflect on how they are changing society for the better.
Schools often take students on community service projects so they can learn how their individual actions affect the well-being of the public.
Abraham Kuyper advocates sphere sovereignty, which honors the independence and autonomy of the "intermediate bodies" in society, such as schools, press, business, and the arts.
A joint study suggests that a more effective approach to community service focuses on increased participation of local people in decision-making and collaborative partnerships.
Being cognizant of who is given a voice in defining the need for community service, and the ways in which these issues are approached, is one of the first steps in recognizing spaces in which participation can be increased.
