Our Schools Need Community Service Learning Programs Essay -- Communit

"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve." - Albert Schweitzer Each community is like a human body, it requires a constant life force to survive. Volunteers and community service workers are the blood that maintains our communities. It fortifies our foundations. A community is only as strong as the weakest link. We must empower those weakened by poverty, discrimination and other social injustices. Compassion is a learned behavior. We obtain it through our parents initially teaching us morals such as empathy, kindness, and fairness. Secondly, we can reinforce it through school-based service learning projects. Mandatory school-based community service learning will benefit our country by an increase in volunteerism from the heart and social skills in our children and teens in the future.Service is your engagement in the relationship of the act of giving. Service is its most sincere when we help through whom we are not by what we do. We have to have compassion in order to serve correctly to be in the situation with someone not just for them (Wade, Rahima C., 1997). Volunteerism is embedded in the fibers of Americans. For centuries we have aided our society in all aspects of volunteerism. Harvard University, in 1636, formed the first academic library which was staffed with volunteers. In 1736, the first Volunteer Fire Department was established; in 1857 the American Red Cross was organized using volunteer labor(Megan 2011). As volunteers, will we promote charity or solidarity? Charity exhibits as insincere, superior, and often views the poor as sub-human. Solidarity presents ... ...g-Youth O’Sullivan, Theresa A., Community Service in The United States, Alternatives to improve volunteerism among Americans, Tallahassee, FL August 2004 Vessels, G., & Huitt, W. (2005). Moral and character development. Paper presented at the National Youth at Risk Conference, Savannah, GA, March 8-10. Retrieved [date], from http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/papers/chardev.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris_Wofford Wade, Rahima C. "From a Distance: Service- Learning and Social Justice." Integrating Service Learning and Multicultural Education in Colleges and Universities . Ed. Carolyn R. O'Grady. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000. Youth helping America educating for active citizenship: service learning, school-based service and youth engagement 3/2006 Publisher: Corporation for National and Community Service. http://www.nationalservice.gov/