Service to the public is such an integral part of any society. Humans are social animals and we need to interact with those around us to keep our lives fulfilling. Community service brings people together and engages them for a common cause and also teaches people about compassion and not to just live for one’s self and serve only their needs. Involving yourself in community service makes you an active member of the community and you can help create an impact on your community and society at large. It also creates a great platform for our younger generations to learn valuable life lessons.
So, let us discuss at length the importance of community service:
Personal Development:
People involving themselves in helping their communities are able to experience things that they might not have been exposed to in any other walk of life. They are able to see what their personal attributes and talents are helpful for and how it works in a social environment. They discover things about themselves and others around them for example, people might find that they can handle stressful situations without breaking down.
It teaches a lot of valuable lessons through the number of odd tasks that one does. Skills like leadership, communication, teamwork and so on are also inculcated in people when they involve themselves in service of others. People tend to get a more positive outlook at life as a whole as helping those less fortunate gives them a good conscience and makes them respect what they have and how fortunate they are.
It is known to make people happier by not only leaving you satisfied because of the help that they provide but also because through their service people meet like minded people and this helps them create unique bonds that satisfy their social needs.
A great platform to teach the younger generations:
A classroom can only teach you very little in life there is no direct substitute to going out to the real world and experiencing things yourself. Involving students in community service is a great way to teach them a lot of valuable lessons that cannot be taught in any classroom.
Students involving themselves in community service are more likely to grow up to become better citizens overall. Students who involve themselves in community services are exposed to people very different from themselves. The poor, marginalized and shunned all are very different when seen from the eyes of a volunteer than from the eyes of someone inside a car looking at someone outside on the road.
It teaches students not to judge people on their current stature, a student who once looked at a homeless person as a social evil or menace and looked down upon them now gets to understand the circumstances that led the homeless person to the that state they are in. This has a profound effect on a student, they also interact with people from different walks of life and this helps them understand society and life better.
By working for a community, a student also learns other valuable real life skills like problem solving, managing stress, being a leader, becoming a team player and so on. It teaches them how to communicate with people better and understand people better thereby breaking them from the small bubble they were part of and thrusting them into the open world. Students also learn what they are best at and also makes them more likely to be a more socially responsible person in the future.
Helps make the world a better place:
Volunteers are rather taken for granted by the general public, we all notice the discrepancies in the society but hardly ever act on them but, volunteers do. If volunteers suddenly stopped working there would be serious ramifications to the way a lot of things in the world work. Helping communities doesn’t have a small impact as many believe.
Community service helps feed a ton of people, put a roof over those without one, helps a lot of people keep themselves warm when they are cold, provides education and the list of things that community service provides is such a vast quantum of things to just put on a list.
So, to put it in financial terms, in the US alone volunteers chose to work for over 7.7billion work hours volunteering their time and effort. Which amounts to 184 billion dollars in monetary value, which is almost equal to the GDP of Ukraine. If all these people stopped working, think of the impact it would have on this world?