5 Outstanding Volunteers Recognized as Cabot Community Celebrities
Points of Light is proud to join with the Cabot Community Celebrity Awards again this year to recognize the achievements and contributions of volunteers who serve every day in communities across the nation.
Each year, Cabot Creamery Cooperative, a New England cheese and dairy product producer, awards celebrities, or community volunteers from all over the United States with a yearly cruise for their service. The goal is to honor the achievements and contributions of volunteers who are making a significant difference in their communities.
For the last five years, Cabot hosts the Community Celebrity Award and Cruise to spotlight those who serve others. Cabot works to inspire more people to contribute time to their communities and is changing the notion of “celebrity” to include the recognition of selfless volunteerism. Cabot has a national partnership with different nonprofits, including Points of Light who play a role in discovering volunteers for the Community Celebrity Cruise. Points of Light members, including HandsOn Network Affiliates identified volunteers across the United States who have dedicated their hearts and time with little thought to personal recognition, and rewarded them with a trip of a lifetime on an Alaskan cruise. For this year’s cruise, the Cabot team has invited previous winners to attend to bring new and old winners together to celebrate the power of service.
Cabot is owned by 1,200 dairy farm families throughout New York and New England. Cabot produces award-winning cheeses that are made with love and pride and manages four plants in three states.
Keep reading for more information about the winners this year!
After volunteering in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina with various agencies using his skills as a chef, Gary LeBlanc was inspired to founded Mercy Chefs in his home of Virginia with the goal of providing substantive hot meals to people following natural or national disasters. In the years since, Mercy Chefs and their mobile kitchens have gone on to serve hot meals to nearly 1.5 million people in the wake of disaster, an average of nearly 301 meals a day. They were on the ground during the West Virginia flooding earlier this year and most recently when Louisiana once again faced devastation.
Gary also recognized the need to serve low income families across Hampton Roads and this year served their one millionth meal during their Thanksgiving outreach. Some 3,000 Thanksgiving meals and 2,200 Christmas meals were served this year in Hampton Roads. Mercy Chefs partnered to serve 120 daily meals to students at Title 1 schools for breakfast and lunch during summer break. They hope to expand the numbers this summer and feed 2,000 students at Title 1 schools in Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Chesapeake.
Caitlan is an Army veteran with a huge heart. She has a way of empowering and motivating others and found her passion working with the homeless of Jacksonville. One night she ran into somebody she had served with in the Military who was now homeless. Caitlan became involved with The Mission Continues, a veterans’ group dedicated to using skills learned in the military to serve their communities in new ways. With just a small team, she hits the streets multiple times a week to provide needed items and help veterans set long term goals to get into a more stable situation. She also gives many hours to The Mission Continues to help with a variety of projects such as painting schools, building playgrounds, and replacing fences.
When Karl Yena retired he took the skills he had honed in the private sector for 33 years and began volunteering his time helping nonprofit organizations in his community. Karl now works annually with more than 100 nonprofits in North Carolina to provide ongoing mentoring/coaching to Executive Directors and provides assistance to nonprofits in education, health, municipalities, human services, churches, foundations, and civic organizations & associations in the areas of strategic planning; Board development, staff development training; mediator/facilitator; and human resources & governance policies. His impact is both deep and wide, and he approaches work with the attitude of a servant and with an intent on helping people increase their capacity to serve effectively.
Frandy has incredible dedication to his community and to helping those in need, which comes from an inward desire to do his part to help make the world a better place. His community service efforts are unique because he has made volunteering a regular part of his life. He does this, while also serving his community on a professional level as a Direct Support Professional assisting those who are living with disabilities. He has been a volunteer for Volunteer New York! and participated in community safety days, clean-up events and charity 5Ks. The issues he is most passionate about are hunger and homelessness. He is a regular volunteer with Soup Angels, a program that provides hot meals twice a week to those in need. He is an exceptional example of the spirit of volunteerism.
Steve Sunday has a thing for technology, both of today and of days gone by. He may have picked up a thing or two while spending 36 years in the U.S. Naval Academy Information Technology Department. Upon retirement, he wasn’t sure where to take his life next. Then he saw an advertisement in the local paper looking for volunteers. Steve has been maintaining the Anne Arundel County Volunteer Center’s website ever since. Steve helped connect the Volunteer Center with over 4,000 community volunteers through the website work he did. Thank you for all of your hard work, Steve!
ServiceWorks VISTA is Changing the Narrative in South Central LA
This post is byTracy Hoover, Points of Light’s CEO.
This morning, as part of a 9/11 Day commemoration, I had what anyone would consider a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stand with a group of service champions to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. But what made it even more special was the chance to see it through the eyes of one of my fellow bell-ringers, Alonzo Warren.
Alonzo grew up in South Central Los Angeles. He’s the oldest of 10 children in his family. When he was just 7, one of his parents was laid off and the family was forced to move into public housing. Not long after, they woke up one night to the sound of glass shattering after a firebomb was thrown through the living room window. His home instantly went up in flames.
“We lost everything, generations of family photos, birth certificates, IDs, everything in the house except the clothes we were wearing but no one was hurt. We didn’t have much money, so we were forced to live in our car for a few weeks. It was really tough — a survival situation,” he told me.
As he grew up, Alonzo made friends and stayed away from gangs but still faced tremendous loss and challenges. In ninth grade, he witnessed first-hand a friend being shot and killed. In 11th grade, he lost another friend to a brain tumor. Alonzo says he would ride the public bus for hours, thinking about escaping it all. But as the oldest son, he had a tremendous sense of duty to his family and would always ride the bus back home.
“Choice is the act of hesitation you make before you arrive at a decision,” he said. “That hesitation can be caused by anxiety, or it can be a moment for wisdom. I had some big choices to make — about where my life was heading, about how I was going to change the narrative for the better.”
In 11th grade, Alonzo started a youth program in his school that organized people to help improve the community. In 12th grade, he convened neighborhood meetings to talk about short-term issues and build a longer-term sense of place. After high school, he enrolled in a local community college and began volunteering to mentor younger kids.
As he continued his education and community work, Alonzo realized his purpose in life is his community and the young people he can help on their path to adulthood. “It’s very liberating to actually help your community — to help empower the younger generation to have a voice, and to change the narrative in their neighborhoods,” he told me. He calls his work “asset-based community development,” teaching the “assets” — young people — to find their passion and use their skills to build a better life and a better community.
Alonzo knows that young people today face many barriers to success, including something as simple as the ZIP code they live in. Many lack the soft workplace skills needed in today’s economy. Some don’t have or don’t know how to build a resume. Others can’t afford post-secondary job training or education – or are unsure about navigating the financial aid process. An estimated 1 million students drop out of high school each year. Others are young people involved in the justice system, teen parents or foster care children who aged out of the system without the support needed to create a clear plan for adulthood.
It’s the deep understanding of this reality that many young people face that brought Alonzo to the Points of Light family as an AmeriCorps VISTA member and site leader with ServiceWorks. We’re marking the start of our third year of this groundbreaking national program, powered by the Corporation for National and Community Service, the Citi Foundation and Points of Light. Through ServiceWorks, we use volunteer service as a way to help underserved youth and young adults in targeted U.S. cities develop the 21st century leadership skills they need to prepare for college and careers. And Alonzo has been with us from the start.
The program is a response to research that shows when underemployed opportunity youth design and run volunteer projects, they have a much better chance of finding good jobs. For example, Alonzo led a ServiceWorks team of young volunteers in designing a strategic approach to building community gardens. The project resulted in a fruit-and-vegetable bartering system between neighborhood blocks, nutrition for local homeless people, public awareness of water needs, and sustainability projects for local schools. At the same time, his team of young volunteers gained the leadership, project management, networking and other workplace skills they’ll need to get hired by local employers.
The ripple effect of a project like that is immeasurable. Not only does it help turn an inner-city food desert into a food oasis, it creates social capital, economic opportunity, and specific, measurable solutions to challenges today’s young people face. And it helps turn South Central LA into a place of opportunity for the next generation.
Watching Alonzo stand on the platform at the New York Stock Exchange to commemorate 9/11 as a day of service was the real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. The bell ringing signals the start of another day of opportunity in trading and Alonzo’s achievements represent the great potential of his generation.
You can help change the future for opportunity youth. Explore opportunities to serve as a ServiceWorks volunteer and provide valuable coaching and mentorship to the leaders of tomorrow.
Watch Alonzo Warren ring the Opening Bell at the New York Stock Exchange:
The Purpose App: Reinventing How People are Invited to Serve and Changing How They Apply Their Passion
If you watch Shark Tank, you can picture the set up – an “X” prize competition for social good: bright lights, big stage, tough judges and even tougher questions. Enter our Points of Light team, pitching our idea for bringing more precision to the world of purpose-driven change. Right now, people interested in volunteering go to Points of Light’s allforgood.org – America’s biggest volunteer project database with over 100,000 opportunities – and they enter their interest and zip code to get results. During the competition’s demonstration and rapid-fire Q&A that followed, the Points of Light team effectively made the case for a sea-change in how people discover ways to make a difference – a transformation “from search to social.”
Imagine if you didn’t have to go searching for ways to volunteer your time — what if those opportunities to do good found you? Information finds us all the time in retail and nudges us to buy things based on our digital profile. Try Googling a product you want to buy and then see what ads pop up in your Facebook feed. Think of how clothing websites suggest outfits to customers or how Amazon’s “featured recommendations” are personalized to your tastes based on your purchase history.
Instead of volunteers searching for a way to give their time and talent, we want those opportunities to find the exact right volunteers based on their unique interests and skills. It’s time for all of that daily nudging to be directed at bringing opportunities to do good right to us.
This is our vision for reinventing how people are invited to serve and dramatically expanding who is asked and how they apply their passion to purpose. Our journey to bring this vision to life started in December when HPE launched the Living Progress Challenge. Their goal was to tap into the idea economy and crowd source pitches for mobile apps and web services that that could advance human rights, environmental causes, financial inclusion and health care in emerging economies. They issued the challenge to the social sector with this question: “What software applications and digital services would you create to improve people’s lives?” We answered along with nearly 400 others from the global community, including worthy competitors like Stanford, Red Cross, Harvard Medical School, and the UN World Food Programme.
When the Living Progress Challenge winners were announced in New York recently, the keynote speaker at the event was the founder and CEO of AngelHack, Sabeen Ali. I love his take on what this means: “Today we’ve learned what can happen when revolutionaries partner with innovation giants – we can make the impossible, possible.”
At Points of Light, we engage four million volunteers every year. As one of the four winning ideas of the Living Progress Challenge, we look forward to partnering with HPE to realize the potential of cutting edge technology to reach even more people and better connect them with their purpose.
From Tragedy Comes the Opportunity to Better Serve Our Nation’s Youth
A few weeks ago, Points of Light provided several articles and resources collected from voices of people both inside and outside of Points of Light speaking out about the tragedies of the last few months so that they might contribute to a larger narrative of unity and service in times of crisis.
Throughout the country volunteers are answering the call, lending each other a helping hand, and helping us all find answers for the sometimes uncomfortable questions that this violence raises. Several of our affiliates, including HandsOn Orlando, have been actively responding to injustice and disunity with a call to service.
A Points of Light partner organization, America’s Promise Alliance, the nation’s largest network dedicated to improving the lives of children and youth, is giving a voice to those whose voices sometimes go unheard in times of crisis — the children. Tanya Tucker, vice president of alliance engagement for America’s Promise Alliance, writes:
“We have a collective responsibility to embrace, listen to and support young people directly affected by violence and the countless others in our families, schools and communities indirectly affected. They need us now more than ever. All children deserve safe places to live, learn and grow.”
Tucker’s words serve as a passionate call to serve our nation’s youth. She is not alone; there are a variety of ways you can volunteer to support young people in your area.
Empower youth to reach their full potentials
The Boys and Girls Clubs of America are the leading organizations in the country dedicated to empowering youth to strive for academic and life-long excellence. Through a series of programs and service opportunities, the Boys and Girls club stimulates growth of children into responsible adults.
Help shape the future leaders of America
Combining educational activities and lifelong values with fun is a tradition of both the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America. These organizations provide young boys and girls with exciting extracurricular education opportunities as well as valuable leadership opportunities.
Be a role model for life-long success
At Big Brothers Big Sisters, adult role models are paired with children to foster powerful relationships that empower children to succeed.
Get involved in extracurricular youth enrichment programs
Summer enrichment programs provide essential growth and education during the warm summer months while kids are away from school. Find a camp near you and volunteer to be a counselor or help fill out camp staff in some other way.
Help young students achieve academic goals
Have a direct impact on a child’s education. Tutors can play an important role in the impact of education on a child’s life. Check with a school or after school program to learn how to get involved.
While her voice is one of many, Tanya speaks to a truth that applies to men and women on both sides of the partisan divide. Republican, Democrat; black, white; young, old; we must all be united in service to our youth. As Tanya says, “How we respond and support the young people around us won’t change what happened but could make a difference in how they navigate forward. Let’s be sure when we’re asked what about the children, we have a response we can all be proud of.”
Visit America’s Promise Alliance to learn more about the organization. To find immediate and exciting volunteer opportunities in your area, visit All For Good.
12 Service Project Ideas for Kids
Back-to-school can be a busy time for families, filled with homework, sports practices, school plays, and other extracurricular activities. However, it’s important to remember the role that volunteer service can play in your child’s development. Volunteering together as a family helps kids learn that they can make a positive difference through service to others.
Without further ado, here are 12 simple service projects for kids of all ages:
Younger Kids
Make crafts or write letters to be included in soldier care packages. Operation Gratitude will help you come up with ideas and find a donation center near you.
Organize a food drive in your neighborhood to support a local foodbank, and have your children pick their favorite foods to donate. Feeding America’s Food Bank locator is searchable by zip code and can help you find a food bank near you.
Fill backpacks with cups, pots, pans, soap, toothpaste, and other cosmetics to create homeless “survival kits” to be distributed to homeless people in your community, or find out other ways you can show your support by simply CAREing.
Become a Hospital Buddy and be a supportive friend to a child during their fight against cancer.
Start a crew of neighborhood children to provide free lawn care and snow shoveling services for seniors in your community. Check out Points of Light’s resources for volunteers for tips on how to get started.
During lunch at school, host a hot chocolate or cider stand and donate the proceeds to a charity of your choosing. Charity Navigator will help you find the perfect organization to donate to.
Clean out your bookshelf of older, lightly used DVDs and books and donate them to a local children’s hospital.
Be a companion to a senior in a local nursing home. Make cards and sing carols for them around the holidays. Use Create the Good’s guide for volunteering with seniors to help you get started.
Adopt a military family for the Holidays and bring food, comfort, and friendship to a family struggling to get by.
Making a Habit of Service
Habits that children develop at a young age will stick with them long into adulthood. The following tips will help your children see the power of service and build a lifelong commitment to giving back.
Deliver donated items with your kids. This will help them see and feel the difference they are making in the lives of people they have helped.
Talk about and share your family’s service experience. Help your children process what they did, how it felt, and what they learned.
Choose your next project immediately. Build on your kids’ enthusiasm and search for opportunities to give back in your area on All for Good.
Points of Light Mobilizes Volunteers in Honor of Military Members, Veterans, and First Responders on 9/11 Day of Service
Through volunteer service, Americans connect with the spirit of unity that arose in the aftermath of 9/11. As Points of Light commemorates the 15th anniversary of 9/11 National Day of Service, we highlight those who have been inspired to give back to their communities.
“I’m acutely aware of how things were prior to 9/11. This is the conflict of our generation, and I’ve looked at how it has affected society to see how I could do my part,” said Melissa Ann Sullivan, a passionate volunteer on behalf of U.S. veterans.
Military service is significant for Sullivan, and she has volunteered extensively to show her appreciation and respect. Sullivan has volunteered more than 80 hours with the Armed Forces Retirement Home. Currently, she’s planning a Spa Day for the AFRH ladies of the federally-operated program who account for about 10 percent of the home’s 450 patrons.
“Service is very important to me – something my parents instilled in me at a young age,” says Sullivan, has been recognized with Daily Point of Light Award for her work. This includes working with Honor Flight, an organization that charters flights for World War II veterans nationwide to visit the capital for a day, Sullivan became involved as a greeter for the flights arriving in DC.
Each flight brings between 50 and 90 veterans. Greeters meet them and help those who are physically disabled or who need additional services receive a guardian. In six years, Sullivan has greeted approximately 5,000 veterans and been a guardian for 15.
“Whether I’m working with homeless veterans or older WWII soldiers, volunteering gives me the opportunity to share my gratitude,” she says. “In some cases, veterans share memories of their experiences with me that they’ve never discussed before.”
Share a story honoring 9/11 first responders or a service member close to you on Twitter or Instagram using #911Day and #HonoringService. You can also get involved with our signature events and service projects taking place on the National Mall or one of 30 sites across the country.
5 Opportunities for Students to Volunteer While In School
As summer comes to a close and you head back to school, you may find it hard to imagine fitting in time to volunteer. Schedules become packed with sports practices, school plays, homework, and other extracurricular activities and it may be tempting to put giving back on the back burner. Volunteering, however, is a wonderful resume builder and will help you build skills for a future career. Learn about a new industry, or gain skills to put towards a dream job. Volunteering is also a great opportunity to build up time management skills. In fact, even if time is a limited commodity, there are many ways for you to give back that require minimal time commitment and still allow you to get to soccer practice on time.
1. See what Opportunities are Near You:
Start your search by looking for volunteer opportunities in your area. All For Good allows you to search events based on location and on causes you are passionate about. There are many events that don’t require a heavy time commitment, so you can build volunteering in to your schedule.
Serving with the people closest to you is a fun and motivating way to give back. Doing Good Together arranges volunteer opportunities for families in select cities across the country, whether it’s cleaning up a park on the weekend or volunteering at a local foodbank after school once a week. If Doing Good Together is not in your area, do not be discouraged. generationOn, Points of Light’s youth service division, provides resources for you to create a service project for students of any age.
Why not put the skills you’re gaining in the classroom to good use. Whether you enjoy photography, graphic design, social media, or other hobbies, use what you are passionate about to help a cause you care about! Many organizations are constantly looking for volunteers to put their skills-based knowledge and talents to work. You can find a great database of skills-based volunteer opportunities that allows you to search by skillset at Idealist.org.
4. Join or Make a Club:
Does your school have a Relay For Life event? Many schools and college campuses host their own Relay events, which provides a fun and convenient way to give back. Join a team for a cause you care about or make your own! Don’t want to start it yourself? Get some friends together to do it with you or simply fundraise for a charity of your choosing instead.
Breaks from school are the perfect opportunity to set aside time to give back. During the holiday season, there are a large variety of volunteer opportunities for students. Volunteer with your family at a local soup kitchen or write greeting cards to soldiers or hospital patients spending their holidays away from home. When spring break season comes around, consider alternative spring break programs as a way to travel and give back on a budget.
Helping a Community Cope, Responding to Violence with Service
From national leadership to local communities across the nation, the violent events of the last few months have left many speechless and unsure how to respond – even the most disaster-ready. While emergency medical responders may treat the injuries of those individuals affected, how do we begin to mend the wounds created in our communities after tragedies like the recent terror attack in Orlando?
The LGBTQ community, local residents and people throughout the country were left hurt and grief-stricken following the June 12 shooting at the Pulse Nightclub – the deadliest shooting in U.S. history, with 49 people killed. In Orlando, people struggled with how to cope in the aftermath of the attack, and feelings of isolation hit many within the LGBTQ community.
Following the tragic event, Points of Light affiliate HandsOn Orlando sought to reach the grieving community through volunteerism, demonstrating the unique power of service to unite people across all types of boundaries and backgrounds.
The organization reached out to their more than 20,000 constituents by email, providing logistics and stressing the desperate need for blood donations to support the more than 50 survivors who remained in critical condition following the attack.
Plans to attend a local vigil were accompanied by the idea to create a banner that attendees, victims’ friends and families, and first responders could sign. Later, this banner would be divided and distributed to victims’ family members.
Kyle Trager, community partnerships manager at HandsOn Orlando, stressed the importance of reaching out to members of the affected community and bringing them together through service. With this in mind, the organization launched a series of volunteer projects called “49 for 49.”
These projects, one for each of the 49 victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting, provided the perfect opportunity to empower hundreds of community members, offering them the chance to make a difference and stand united in service in response to the hateful actions that left so many feeling helpless.
From a Birthday Party for Homeless Children to Food Sorting Fun, each project was adapted from one of the organization’s existing service projects and individually honored one of the 49 victims. HandsOn Orlando staff read an account of each victim’s life and facilitated a discussion with the volunteers, providing a safe space for community members to reflect on the tragedy and connect with each other. Finally, before each project took place, volunteers observed a moment of silence.
Projects like these serve to provide communities with a number of opportunities to respont to tragedy. They offer a safe space for people to reflect on and learn from others’ experiences with the event, while also empowering individuals to take action through volunteer service to help their community recover.
HandsOn Orlando received the Champion of Service Award from Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Volunteer Florida CEO Chester Spellman for their response following the attack and dedication to helping others in need. The organization has discussed the potential of directing their volunteer labor towards a permanent volunteer memorial in the future, but for now they are committed to keeping this incident at the local forefront through a legacy of service even after the news has died down nationally.
To find volunteer opportunities in your area, visit All for Good, or visit the HandsOn Orlando website to read more about their 49 for 49 projects.
What’s Their Secret? Lessons from the Most Community Minded Companies in America
Chances are that when you receive a package from UPS you don’t give a second thought to the complex logistics underway to deliver nearly 20 million packages a day. That’s because world class logistics is their expertise and core to their business strategy. But also core to UPS’ business strategy is a dedication to using that expertise to solve some of our world’s most pressing challenges.
When UPS employees learned that the inability to deliver life-saving medications results in millions of preventable deaths each year, they decided to act. This year, UPS will transform the delivery of humanitarian aid and life-saving vaccines by using drones. Through a new partnership with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and Zipline, a robotics company, UPS employees will use drones to deliver vaccines to remote clinics throughout Rwanda. This cutting-edge partnership is a win-win for the people of Rwanda, for innovation at UPS, and for the talented employees who can do what they are really good at and save lives.
This is just one example of the many, many ways in which the companies on this year’s
are identifying the needs in their communities that are strategically connected to their business, and then aligning their community involvement and their employees’ skills towards those issues. These companies set the standard for good corporate citizenship across the country and demonstrate that service to others has become a fundamental part of successful businesses spanning every sector of the American economy.
Founded in partnership with Bloomberg and the National Conference on Citizenship in 2012, this annual survey and resulting top 50 list honors a culture of social responsibility in business. The survey considers four aspects of each company: its
investments
in the community (measured largely in volunteer hours, pro-bono donated talents, in-kind donations, money contributed to charity and leadership); the degree to which the company
integrates
its community service programs with key business functions; the ways in which community engagement is
institutionalized
as part of the business itself (for example, included the company’s mission statement); and how it measures the social and business
impact
of the company’s community involvement.
Civic 50 companies have gone beyond simply opening their checkbooks and are employing an “all-of-the-above” approach to community engagement — integrating input from employees, customers, and their local communities into everything from their employee handbooks to their workplace culture to their product design. As a result, Civic 50 companies are putting themselves at the center of change to create more enduring and sustainable business models.
Here’s a snapshot of how the Civic 50 are doing it:
90% have a formal, structured effort to solicit community feedback.
78% included community engagement on department scorecards. This was an increase from 70% in 2014.
56% included community engagement as a formal written component of employees’ performance reviews. This is an increase from 50% the previous year.
62% said they took a leadership position on four or more national public education or policy advocacy efforts.
Half use community engagement to support skill-development for employees, an increase from 46% in 2014.
Nearly one-quarter of employee volunteer hours are skill-based. This represents an increase from 20% the previous year.
The top five business functions that their community engagement programs support are: diversity and inclusion, recruiting, stakeholder relations, marketing/PR, and employee engagement.
This year’s Civic 50 winners demonstrate that they are doing the hard work of building more community-minded businesses, and that the business sector plays a critical role as a catalyst for civic engagement. This is big news. Increasingly, American businesses are partnering with government, nonprofits and individuals to solve the biggest challenges facing our communities. Both socially-minded employees and consumers are driving businesses to place social-oriented values at the center of their operations. This ingrained ethic of service helps socially responsible businesses recruit better employees, build customer loyalty, find bottom-line rewards, and become better corporate citizens.
Check out
to get an inside look at the secret sauce that helped these companies make the list.
Houston Youth and Skills-Based Volunteers Leave ServiceWorks Bootcamp Equally Inspired
ServiceWorks Skill-Building Bootcamps provide 16- to 24-year-olds the opportunity to develop new workplace skills, expand their personal networks and understand how service can be a vehicle for both. For the second time this summer, ServiceWorks recently brought this powerful experience to a new city.
This time it was Houston – where approximately 60 youth took park in a truly transformative day that left both the young people and the volunteers there to teach them – equally inspired.
Serving as the official launch of
in Houston, and held in partnership with the White House Summer Opportunity Project and Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Education Office as a way to align local and national resources to ensure a better economic future for disconnected young people, the event itself carried plenty of significance. But it was the lessons and conversations of the day that will provide the most lasting impact.
For the first time, a Points of Light Sunday Supper conversation was targeted specifically to teens. Over the lunch break, Points of Light Chairman Neil Bush kicked off a talk on how the challenges caused by racial inequalities impact their chances for college and career success.
Summarizing her table’s conversation, 17-year-old Lian drew a powerful analogy to how African-American communities often feel like they’re a broken bone hanging off society’s body. She added, “I think most of us can come to the conclusion that racial conflict comes from ignorance. It’s a problem of not-knowing, and people not taking the time to understand conflict.”
18-year-old Jathiya echoed those sentiments: “Anything that will help us educate those in the community about us, about what we’re going through. Maybe they just need to understand us a little bit better and we can all coexist in peace and in community.”
Also speaking at lunch was Jim Reilly, Vice Chair of Global Energy for Citi, who talked about Citi’s commitment to helping Opportunity Youth through their
initiative. “ServiceWorks was designed to inspire young people to become agents of change in their own communities while also developing their professional and career goals. These skill-building boot camps are a great example of how ServiceWorks can be delivered to a large number of youth in a very impactful way,” said Reilly.
Several Citi employee volunteers joined over 40 other skills-based volunteers to facilitate particularly impactful sessions on project management and conflict resolution. The project management workshop focuses on how to “plan the work and work the plan” for situations that are very real and relevant to young adults: getting a job, buying a car and applying to college.
“We hear ‘go to college, go to college, go to college.’- But even just taking the steps to apply to college can be overwhelming and stressful. Today I got to learn how to break it down into simple steps so it’ll be easier for me,” said Lian.
Skill-Based volunteers also led workshops on conflict resolution, where participants (Service Scholars) shared powerful stories of bullying, while playing out scenarios to help them better handle these potentially uncomfortable or even threatening situations.
Many of these volunteers left as inspired as the participants. Said one Project Management volunteer, “I found the participants to be engaging, articulate and bright. My faith in millennials is restored, and I was glad to be a part of such a praiseworthy cause.”
One of those millennials, 19-year-old Fayzah, said a ServiceWorks Bootcamp can inspire young people with the kind of thinking that aligns with the Points of Light mission: “I learned I can do something in society right now. I don’t have to be a certain age. I don’t have to be in office to be the change. Right now, I can be the change. I don’t have to wait for the future.”
