RED the Book: How to Turn Teenage All-About-Me-ism into Altruism

This post was written by Carey Dunne, 19, an author of RED the Book, a collection of personal essays written by 58 American teenage girls, recently released in paperback. She is a sophomore studying English at Oberlin College.

The Obamas' call to service for Martin Luther King, Jr., Day was two weeks ago today. But to my generation of Americans, I'm afraid it might as well have been issued by Abraham Lincoln. It's already history.

On the list of things I think of when I think of kids my age in this country, community service is buried way down -- under SAT prep, iPhones, My Super Sweet Sixteen, Ashton Kutcher. And even there, it tends to have a footnote that says "to get into a good college." Eighteen- to 22-year-olds were the most hyped demographic in this election. We were also the kids who shopped till we dropped and to whom volunteerism has generally meant either a boost into the Ivy League or donating hours photographing a friend for her MySpace profile.

But for several months back there, we canvassed and ran phone banks for Obama's campaign. We gave them our cell numbers so they could text us. We voted. With a bit of building on this momentum, my generation's often selfish approach to helping others could start to change. I'm sure the Obamas' MLK Day appeal was galvanized enough to convince some young people in this country to choose blood-giving and soup-serving over sleep and TV. Still, it was mostly older Americans who participated in community service projects on Monday, January 19 -- which was already a national holiday, so no one lost pay to do so.

But what about this Monday? And the next? These are hardly times when, during a normal work week, adults can spare a day's or even an hour's wage to help people in need. They need help themselves.

If you're a full-time student, however, the tradeoff is entirely different: It's a class, not a living wage, you'd be missing. And working in a shelter or a hospital would make students feel more powerful than just blobs filling in bubbles.

To put Obama's ideology into action, every high school and college in this country should require at least one hour a week of active community service from its students. This new volunteer workforce of 97 million Americans under age 25 would provide essential help in times when fewer employed adults can offer their time for free and not-for-profits are hurting.

One hour, that's it -- like a class, instead of a class, only not for grades. Absence of grades would be another element of the appeal of regular volunteerism to young people: a weekly break from the tyranny of competition and evaluation that goes with nearly everything else about school.

Organizations could alert local schools to their needs, then schools could offer a wide range of options in the community, from needle exchanges to chimpanzee refuges. In an ideal world, just knowing that you've helped another human being would be enough of a reward. But for most people, it helps if the cause feels like their own. If there's something students are into that's not on the list, they could nominate it -- furthering their sense of investment and rallying friends on its behalf.

The rewards come from there: The personal becomes the political, the communal, the national. My 16-year-old brother, whose school already requires community service, says that tutoring elementary-school kids reduces stress in his life.

Making community service as much a part of young Americans' weekly lives as algebra and reality shows would also have a powerful effect on my generation's ideas about race, privilege, and entitlement. The under-25 population contains the largest percentage of non-white and multiracial Americans, and we will be the first generation to reach a white minority in this country, as soon as 2023. To enlist every one of us in community service is to create the most diverse army of help any nation has ever seen.

Sadly and honestly, I'd say most people in this country see volunteerism as a history of the white and fortunate helping the not white and not fortunate. Perverse as it is, mandatory student community service has for the most part been exclusive to private-school curriculum--for the kids who can generally afford to spend Tuesdays after school at a nursing home or eight weeks river-keeping in Indonesia, rather than earning money for the family in a part-time job.

The summer after eleventh grade I went to Lima, Peru, with a volunteer organization whose aim was cross-cultural studies. Most of the kids in the program were upper-middle-class. Every morning we were chauffeured through shanty towns to a pre-school, where we watched kids learn numbers and sometimes sponged juice spills at snack time. The school didn't benefit in any obvious way from the lurking foreign teenagers.

Still, the other volunteers and I felt that we gained from the experience. However subtly or temporarily, our perspectives on privilege changed. We weren't transformed into teenage Gandhis, but the sense of entitlement to our iPods and big dorm rooms wavered. One girl told me it was the first time she'd ever felt genuinely unselfish.

If even well meaning but misguided volunteering helps the volunteers as much as it helps those they are supposedly serving, imagine the gains when kids who could really be on either side of the community-service equation are put on the giving, empowered end. Young people who grow up hearing every day at home that they are the charity cases can begin to escape that way of thinking -- to be met with respect and their own ability to affect change, starting with that one hour every week.

With kids of all races and classes on the serving side, stereotypes are exploded, boundaries are frustrated. No one segment of the population is perceived as more or less in need. No one segment of the population is the other, the giver or the taker of aid.

Right now, when lines stretch for blocks from soup kitchens, we need more than a few well-off people donating cans of yams from the back of their cupboards. Every one of the nation's young people could start contributing to a foundational American belief in service -- and finding something else extraordinary about themselves to cultivate and put in college-admissions essays.

Comments

[Kari Henley - Huffpost Blogger]

Bravo and well done!
Wonderful post and well said.
I will be writing next week about how the youth of our consumer driven society haven't really been "needed" and therefore aren't motivated to donate time, work and make a difference.

How refreshing to see someone so young be so wise, and what a great leader for us all to follow.
Cheers!
Kari

[PlaceboStudman]

I'd much rather have mandatory community service work and volunteerism than, say, mandatory military service. But, we need to change the definition of service and volunteering in this country.

As a disabled man, who is now primarily bedridden, I know the value of human contact. Sometimes it makes me feel silly to realize how much joy I receive from an unexpected phone call or email from someone i haven't seen or spoken to in awhile. Service and volunteerism doesn't require spending ANY money, nor does it even necessarily requiire leaving the house. To help someone best, help their spirit, lift their soul, and bring them some joy.

As I said, a phone call, an email. Something, anything small that shows you care, can do more for someone in need than any amount of time or money you could spend.

[rlugbill]

I agree that community service should be a daily part of children's education. In every pre-industrial society, teenagers are expected to contribute to society.

Now, we tell children that it's all about individual achievement. Grades and getting into a good college. And the ones who do community service work often do it so they can put it on their college applications to show that they are well-rounded. We teach children to be self-centered by making their educations all about them (individual achievement), then we complain because our children are self-centered. We taught them to be that way.

In olden days, the older children in one-room schools helped the younger ones with their lessons. When they got home, they helped around the house with chores, cleaning, cooking, child care, etc. My mother claims to have spent much of her childhood canning vegetables.

It's not healthy for children to be so focused on the self. Yes, they need a balance, but we have gone completely into the self-absorbed side of things.

My concern with your proposal is that schools and bureaucracies would mess it up if we turned over the idea to them. And something needs to be subtracted if we are going to add this to already busy teenagers' schedules of school, homework, dating, extra-curricular activities, work, etc.

[girljordyn]

I'm not sure what I think about making it mandatory... on the one hand it would get done, but a lot of high schools already have mandatory community service hours for graduation and personally I think putting it like that just makes it another requirement for graduation. It would be better if teens were taught more about charity and knew that the opportunities to volunteer - and to donate their time to a cause or charity they really love - are there. Sometimes even if you want to help, you don't know where or how to; it doesn't seem very available.

[Amy Goldwasser - Huffpost Blogger]

Any thoughts--­particular­ly from Carey's generation out there--on whether making community service mandatory (like making ANYTHING mandatory for anyone under-25) is the answer? Or risks a backlash, just something new to rebel against/skip? Wonder if Obama is kind of changing a larger idea of rebellion: all of a sudden it's cool to like your country and charity work, even.

[Emily-Nicole Johns]

In regards to the idea of mandatory community service, the Catholic high school that I attended required that each year, mostly during the summer months, every student was required to perform a required amount of hours so that by the end of your high school career you had completed at least 200 hours total. I feel that this requirement, made the idea far less appealing to my peers and cause the majority to just fake a signature instead of actually getting themselves out there. Sometimes the word requirement automatically causes people to squeal when it should be something you are interested in and are excited to help with. Yet, what makes one type of community service more appealing than the other? The fact that you can leave the house, maybe even fly down to New Orleans and help out in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? I think we need to work on putting the various ways to help out there instead of contemplating if it should be necessary. It is necessary, but if someone isn't willing to help who are we to push them to do it? Just YOURSELF out there and help as much as possible. Its one of the most rewarding feelings there is, and then maybe your peers will see that and want in... right?

[ArthurTwoShedsJackson]

This may be slightly OT but I have a problem with senior citizens getting a free pass on these kinds of discussions. Of course I am not refering to truly infirmed seniors in nursing homes, etc.

I am, however, thinking of seniors [who I am anecdotally aware of] who have an offensive sense of entitlement, grumble about paying their taxes, and regard local public schools as nothing more than a necessary evil. If seniors were to volunteer their often plentiful time to the greater community maybe they would find there is more to life than sitting in front of the boob tube locked onto Faux News, or hate radio, or for that matter, voting in disproportionate numbers for Repubs year in and year out.