Volunteering isn’t a bad thing. From soup kitchens to animal shelters, volunteering and giving back to the community are seen as a definite plus for anyone that participates, both in a moral sense and also for the ever-important college application. However, the manner in which many service clubs at MVHS operate stifles creativity and allows students to feel as if giving back to the community involves fulfilling a specific quota.
Volunteer clubs are the most common type of organization at MVHS. Their members combined include more than half of the student body. Although each club professes its own platform and goals, in reality, each works in roughly the same way: having members sign up for shifts of a few hours to participate in random volunteer events. Although the moral merit of these events cannot be called into question, the random nature of these various volunteer activities lessens the basic virtue of community service: having a personal stake in the improvement of society.
Going to the Octagon website, it can be found that among the available volunteer events are Stanford Concessions, selling food at a football game and Christmas in the Park, helping set up for the annual holiday attraction in downtown San Jose. Similarly, among the current volunteer events for Key Club available are attending a dance for which proceeds go to an unspecified charity, helping harvest an apple orchard and helping out at the annual Los Altos Festival of Lights parade. All these events are available for service hours, which contribute to a member’s overall quota for the semester. Although events such as these help the community to a degree, they encourage the idea that community service is nothing more than fulfilling a set quota of hours without giving any thought to the actual events. Volunteering at events like these is easy and quick, and makes giving back to the community a simple task. However, the problem isn’t that students are unwilling or unmotivated to participate in community service — volunteer hours and college applications are completely sufficient at motivating students to contribute. Therefore, volunteer events shouldn’t be aimed at giving students an easy way out. They should give students a pathway towards developing innovative solutions to problems facing society.
Volunteer clubs at MVHS have the opportunity to expand this ideal in their members. They should offer students the opportunity to think of and participate in long-term, comprehensive projects which aim to accomplish clear goals. There’s nothing wrong with serving food at homeless shelters, but the effect that students have on the community could be so much greater with just a little more focus.
The brain power and work ethic present at MVHS is incredible. If this army were put to work on bigger moral causes instead of only trying to fulfill quotas, the effect on the community would be immeasurable.
