Inspired by this thread, which I don’t want to hijack.
At any time were in your life, were you forced, compelled, strongly encouraged etc. to volunteer your time & effort? How & why? What did you have to do? Did you benefit from the experience, and in what way?
I went to a Catholic high school just outside of Philadelphia from 1981-85. Seniors were strongly encouraged to volunteer at a soup kitchen run by a church near Center City. It was part of a class required for seniors, and wasn’t easy to get out of - IIRC it counted for 20-30% of your grade, so if you skipped you could easily fail the class. You left school around 3, got back around 8. I did it twice, so I put in about 8 hours total, not counting travel time.
We had to help set up the dining room & chow line, bring all the food out of the kitchen (we didn’t assist with the cooking), and serve meals (cafeteria style) to the people that came in. They served dinner from 5-6, and we stayed to help clean up afterwards.
What did I, as a middle class 17 year old, learn? Being homeless sucks. Being around homeless people sucks too. The majority of homeless people have no real drive to improve their lot in life. A lot of them were crazy, most of the rest were shameless hustlers. We were firmly instructed NOT to give any of them money, and NOT to give out any information about ourselves other than our first names. Most of them seemed ungrateful and unhelpful - more than half left their trays on the tables, even though they had to walk past the dropoff area on the way out.
All I really took away from the experience was a fervent desire to never be homeless myself, and a feeling that running a soup kitchen doesn’t help the homeless do anything but survive another day. I think I’ve matured since then (hah), but this small bit of forced volunteerism certainly didn’t make me feel more generous to my fellow man.
I had to do the same thing in a catholic school in Philly --10 hours each year (which really is nothing). I chose to go to a nursing home, they tried to get us to go into the rooms and talk to people that didn’t have any families/visitors, but they were all batshit insane and it scared me when walking down the hallways calling out that I’m their grandson. I felt really bad – especially since my grandmother was in a nursing home. We visited her often though, but I always HATED walking to her room. After the first day (and subsequent years) we would grab a trashbag, walk around the grounds and pick up some trash, and fake the rest of the hours.
I’ve learned to never grow old. It’s not working. I haven’t really done much volunteer work since then – some stuff for my fraternity in college. I’d rather just donate money (which I don’t do as often as I could/should).
My husband, every year, is hustled into the 100% for United Way at work. It was only $5.00 or something, but our feelings on the United Way, combined with the fact that we do donate to other charities, but it really ticks me off.
The fact that this hustle takes place, while not necessarily the fault of the United Way, makes them look even more skeevy.
The house I grew up in used to have its basement flood whenever we got more than a thimbulful of rain. One day, my dad just got sick of it, and we spent the weekend visiting hardware stores and essentially re-structuring the water flow from the roof of our house via new gutter-work and a re-designing of the landscape that immediately surrounded the place.
Well, it paid off. A week later, our entire town flooded, and our basement was dry as a bone. In order to help folks out, we took in two or three families (hard to keep track, a lot of people in and out of the place.)
Anyway, my mother, for whatever reason, decided that my brother and I would volunteer to help fill sandbags to stop more flooding in the town. We didn’t want to do it. I mean, we REALLY didn’t want to do it. My mom tends to be a push-over in such things, but for whatever reason, she put her foot down on this one. So, for one day during the flooding, my brother and I were volunteers to fill sandbags in a grade-school parking lot.
This being said, I’m surprised that so many people have taken away negative experiences from being ‘volunteered’. For me, it brought a sense of community. Maybe it was because I was helping people I knew? I don’t know. I know that I -still- do volunteer work currently. shrug.
Catholic grade school. Church was having their annual festival so I was encouraged to volunteer. I choose to work behind the scenes at the grill tent pulling brats and burgers from the refridgerated truck and stage them for the two cooks. Easy right? Nope. The two cooks were some veteran church member guys who butted heads and thought their way of doing things was correct, were being stubborn about it, and were both too chicken shit to confront eachother about it so they took out their frustrations by bitching at the ladies serving the food and me getting the food for them. I was supposed to work Fri-Sat-Sun but abandoned them after Friday. Cocksuckers can get their own damned food.
Yeah. High school…before we graduated, we had to do a certain amount of community service, so we ended up doing some work (painting fences/porches, clean up) at this place, Green Chimney for wayward or abandoned youth, and then picking up trash near this pond. It left me surprisingly empty inside.
It wasn’t compulsory but I guess I felt some obligation to volunteer at the nursing home in high school, through a program run by a wonderful old nun and consisting of maybe her, me and a couple of other students. My father would drive us out there after church. We would play Bingo and occasionally Sister tried to get us to dance around. It was relatively painless but I don’t know that I would have chosen to do it.
We had to do thirty hours of community service to graduate from my (public) high school. I helped people fill out papers to receive food from a Pantry, and a few other things. I didn’t really gain anything from it.
You have obviously never worked in a corporate environment that is collecting for them. They come right up to the edge of stating it is mandatory to “donate”. I hated that feeling.
Also, the United Way supports the Boyscouts of America, which some feel is a discriminatory agency due to their anti-gay stance.
Do APO service hours count as being “volunteered?”
Actually. . .the only time I ever recall being forced to volunteer was the annual event that we had to do in our chapter. It was fixing up an old Boy Scout camp. We did it every year in April. I’d’ve rather done anything but volunteer there. There were oodles of wasps–even in April! WTF?–and I’m pretty much useless at the kind of things that involve fixing up a camp. The first time I was there, they took the hammer away from me. Something about cruelty to nails. I was also fairly hopeless at mass cooking–though I’m much better at it now–and so helping in the kitchen was more like “helping” in the kitchen. As in, the kind of “help” you get from a six year-old who wants to “help” mom and dad cook.
I hate feeling useless, and the excursions were therefore quite painful. Unfortunately, it was the only required service event, so I was stuck.
No? I currently have a donation coming off my paycheque every two weeks to support the United Way. I have never felt obliged to contribute, encouraged yes: obliged no. The United Way does a lot of good community work. (Those evil Boyscouts outstanding.)
40 hours to be completed during your junior or senior year (I forget now) at my Catholic high school in Wilmington, DE. I volunteered at a small local veterinary hospital: cleaning cages, helping bathe cats and dogs, sitting with the pets and their owners as they waited for the doctor, and playing with the animals after hours. I loved it.
That’s great that you’ve never felt obliged to contribute, but a lot - I mean, a LOT - of people have. There are several old threads around here on the topic. Also, their overhead percentage is a lot higher than I like to see for a charitable organization I’m going to donate money to.
Anyway, back to topic, I had to do community service for my 8th grade confirmation, and chose volunteering in a hospital. After two weeks of spoon-feeding elderly patients and changing bedsheets, I got moved to the “transport” dept., which mainly involved ferrying blood samples and paperwork from department to department. I liked it okay, but it didn’t really instill any lasting feelings of goodwill in me or anything.
I also had to do ~10 hours of community service for my Catholic confirmation. Two soup kitchens for me, then I volunteered extra for a Renaissance Fair-like dinner they had at the Catholic Church, (the main Olde-timey feature of which was verbal abuse of the waitrons, which was encouraged as “in keeping with the times”, but it was worth it for all you can eat plum pudding!)
The soup kitchens, OTOH, always had too many volunteers and I ended up feeling superfluous. I can reproduce that feeling at work, which is why I don’t volunteer (plus, you’re at least as bossed-around as at a normal job, so you don’t feel helpful orempowered.) Although I guess that’s better than not being adequately staffed.
All of the Hallkids have been required to volunteer, either because I required it, or because it was required by their high school to graduate. Sometimes, they got to choose their place (Hallgirl1 even joined the Key Club in high school), and some times they did not (Salvation Army Homeless Shelter in Tulsa, I’m thanking you). What did they learn? You’d have to ask them, but off the top of my head they learned to work their asses off not to be homeless, uneducated and engage in criminal activity. Hallboy spent two summers volunteering at our local chapter of Volunteers of America and although he initially wasn’t happy, he now looks back of his time there with good feelings towards it. Plus, he’s the only person he knows at aged 14 can say, “I’ve worked for the past two summers.”
I don’t know that I’ve ever been forced to volunteer. Most of mine has been done voluntarily. Not only has it given me a sense of being able to contribute something, but it’s also made me grateful of what I have and where I am in life. (And doubly thankful that I’m no longer a sixteen year old mother living in poverty.)
I went to a Catholic high school, and all seniors regardless of AP placement or not were required to do 35 hours of community service. Some did soup kitchen, or candy striping, some volunteered fixing up churches or community centers. I went to a nursing home and was assigned a lady with which to spend time. We’d talk, play board games, or I’d sit with her while she ate, or comb her hair.
It was not really a problem even though I was in the advanced classes and had a 16 hour a week part time job. So I don’t really understand the bellyaching in the other thread.
When my kids are a little older (13 or so) I hope to start going with them to some sort of volunteering. We’re not well off, but perspective is always a good thing to have.
I was never forced to participate, but when I was a kid, my mom worked in an emergency social services program for the Salvation Army. My sister and I often went to help out in the soup kitchen, or visiting a nursing home to sing carols, that kind of thing. We thought it was fun. I still typically spend Christmas Eve working in a soup kitchen - a friend of my mom’s organizes it and funds Christmas dinner out of her own pocket for a couple hundred people every year. It’s a fun group project, and the sense of cameraderie is great. I was sad to have to miss it last year.
