Engaging a Busy Generation
By Sasha Belenky
For me, freshman year of college was NOT the non-stop party of college lore. I was studying round the clock and sleep deprived, just trying to stay above water in a turbulent sea of hyper competitive pre-med piranhas. The very last thing I had time for – or so I thought—was to volunteer.
One afternoon, I followed my roommate to the student organization fair where a girl at a brightly colored booth told me about Vanderbilt Student Volunteers for Science, or VSVS for short. She said that I’d only have to commit 5 hours a semester to teach 1-hour-long science lessons to elementary school students in the Nashville Public School system. Sounds easy enough, I thought. So I signed up.
Flickr photo by meddygarnet - click for link!
As it turned out, I loved to teach. VSVS lessons were fun and interactive. We taught students about polymers by making slime. We taught them about iron compounds by testing iron-fortified Frosted Flakes. We even made ice cream with liquid nitrogen. And we had a blast doing it! I felt like a mentor to the kids, and the confidence it gave me translated over to my school work.
I re-applied the following semester, only this time I signed up to be a team leader. Then after another semester, I interviewed to be on the VSVS board. My senior year, I was elected president of VSVS. I went from having no time to volunteer, to running an organization with over 500 volunteers.
The reason I’m telling you this story is because I believe it illustrates part of the struggle in engaging youth to volunteer, and a way to overcome it. I understand college age students that feel like there’s just no time to volunteer. I was one, and let me tell you, there wasn’t time to volunteer. But I started out small, with just 5 hours a semester, and ended up with something much greater. It became easier to give my time to VSVS because I gradually developed a personal stake in its success and that of the kids we taught. And as it turned out, making bottle rockets was a great way to blow off steam after an Organic Chemistry exam.
To learn more about Vanderbilt Student Volunteers for Science head on over to http://studentorgs.vanderbilt.edu/vsvs/ .
Check out metrounitedway.org/studentuw for more information on Student United Way.
