How Does Community Service Help Communities, And How Can Students Be Attracted To Participate In It.

Service builds strong leadership skills, so information technology makes sense that we would want to engage more students to leave and do good piece of work for their community. The struggle comes, though, in making the switch to being excited about work outside of the classroom, managing logistics, and doing accurate, meaningful work.

Since 2015, the Helper Helper team has worked with colleges and loftier schools to make a drastic and immediate impact in their community through service challenges. As of this writing, we've helped over 104,000 students across more than 380 schools give in excess of half a million hours to their communities. Hither are some all-time practices nosotros've learned along the way.

one. Set a Goal for Your Students

From academics to athletics. From marathon training to sales. Stating and committing to measurable goals by a ready date is one of the best beginning steps toward accomplishing goals and changing behavior.

Some groups similar NHS and entire states like Maryland volition set up these goals with a minimum required number of service hours. That method works; at Helper Helper, we too like to set milestone goals for students to attain as a grouping.

During the fall of 2015, for example, all of the 100+ schools participating in the Helper Helper challenge set a goal of having each group get fourscore% of its students to perform a combined 500 hours of community service hours with a clear deadline 3 months from the start date.

The results came in to 71,526 hours of service and $ane.half-dozen million economic impact (or just over 715 hours of affect per schoolhouse).

Measurable goal x defined amount of fourth dimension = major impact.

2. Curate Opportunities Students Care Nigh

There'southward no question near it: people are more likely to volunteer to do work they're excited about. And they're more likely to exist excited by work they experience some connection to.

Because of this, we encourage schools to work with community organizers and students to curate service opportunities.

We abet for students to be involved in this procedure because students have higher increases in character traits like self-conviction and critical thinking skills when they have ownership over the planning of their service.

At the same time, teachers and other staff are a wealth of knowledge of existing relationships with the community. For this reason, adults in the building must besides have the responsibility to submit service opportunities.

The of import piece here is to avoid copying and pasting an outdated or unreviewed listing. Backlog overwhelms people when making decisions. Also, if in that location are as well many options, and so it will become difficult for students to observe the service that resonates with them.

Share quality opportunities with students and enroll them in the process of identifying and developing their service commitment.

3. Encourage Friendly Contest

Let's get a misconception out of the way: friendly contest IS NOT AT ODDS with community service.

Friendly contest gets people excited, brings them together, and pushes them to practice more than.

This is why Helper Helper hosts our community service challenges: to become more students involved and push themselves to do more work for the community.

Some of our highest contributing groups of students in previous challenges accept benefited greatly from friendly competition. In fact, some colleges fifty-fifty participated in a bracket-style tournament to push each other to increase their impact:
March Madness Community Service Bracket

Teams cooperating and existence challenged by other teams pushes all to do more.

4. Connect Service To Students' Learning & Reflect

Those of united states of america familiar with service learning know that customs service can take direct ties to the objectives in the classroom. Equally teachers facilitate critical thinking, a solid technique is to have students apply their learning in a new environment.

Applying knowledge from the classroom to the service in the community through reflection and dialogue skyrockets learning.

Building a firm or other structure? That's a great opportunity to talk almost geometry. Planting a community garden? Permit'south talk about the ecosystem or the history of irrigation or the social impacts of sustainable farming.

Take the learning outside of the classroom.

5. Track Your Progress

To support tips 1 and iii (set goals and encourage competition), you need to track your students, groups, and schools' progress during your push button for an increased commitment to customs service.

Many of united states of america accept used paper/pencil sheets to log our hours. And others of usa have had to take those papers and alter our jobs to total-time information entry to become them into a spreadsheet.

While this might get you by with a small-scale grouping of 10 or fewer students volunteering once every month or and then, the paper and spreadsheet method will non cut information technology if y'all want to make a noticeable increase in how your students touch your community.

Helper Helper'southward web portal and app make this tracking easy. In addition to other benefits, the software allows students to input their hours from an app on their phone when they go to their community service commitment. And so, school staff view hours and run reports from the spider web portal (and add more customs service opportunities).

Since this is such a powerful part of making a greater impact in the customs, Helper Helper provides costless admission to the web portal and app for whatever school participating in i of our community service challenges.

Motion to the digital world while tracking your students' progress to their goals.

And so What Now?

Any time is a good fourth dimension to start getting students more than involved in community service. At Helper Helper, we're hosting a free challenge for high schools to get out in the community and practice amazing work betwixt March and April. We'd love for yous to join u.s..

To accept the next stride in getting more of your students engaged in community service, register for a Helper Helper demo. A Helper Helper team member will connect with you to learn more most how our platform helps schools and students brand a difference.