Most students understand, or at least have heard, that performing community service is something you should do in preparation for applying to colleges. But why? What do colleges care if you’ve served? Is it just another arbitrary hoop for you to jump through, a sort of weeding-out process? Do they actually believe that simply performing some community service will make you a “good person”? And what kind of community service should you do?

At the most basic level, colleges are interested in how you serve your community because they are going to be your community, and they want to know how you might fit in. They want, to paraphrase President Kennedy, people who will not just ask what their community can do for them, but what they can do for their community. And because how people behave in college usually looks a lot like how they behave in high school, asking about your service to others while you were in high school is a simple way for them to gauge how you may serve others when you’re in their college community. It’s important that everyone, no matter how wealthy or challenged in terms of time, money, or talents, finds a way to give as well as receive, and so community service is something you should plan on while in high school.

For high school students approaching community service, there are two main categories: the simple route, and the creative route. You’ll probably do things that fall into both categories, though most of your energy may be in one or the other.

The simple route is where “community service hours” come in. The simple route is to work at events that are recruiting volunteers and to keep track of the quantity of your service. This includes working car washes, helping to staff community events or fund-raisers, volunteering at food banks or nursing homes, or any sort of event where you are serving someone else’s organization. This route is popular, because it doesn’t necessarily involve much time or effort outside of the volunteer event itself, because it has set times and tasks, and because a sponsor or other authority can easily vouch for the hours that you spent helping.

The simple route isn’t necessarily easy—in fact it rarely is. But it’s usually pretty straightforward, simple to do, and simple to explain. Your school may have a volunteering club or honor society that essentially works to match events with volunteers.

The drawback to the simple route is that it’s easy for others to look at it cynically. If you can show that you’ve worked many hours in a seemingly random assortment of events that aren’t connected to each other, then it’s easy for college admission committees—or anyone else—to wonder if you really do care about the community, or if you’re just doing these things to “get the hours” and check it off your list. If you work 300 volunteer hours but people don’t believe you really care, then those hours—while useful to those you served—may not get you much in terms of college acceptance.

The creative route is one where, instead of working for someone else's organization, you create the organization that other people work for. This can look like different things: taking over leadership of an existing club at school, starting a new club at school, getting a grant from an organization to run your own project, or even starting your own non-profit organization. Like the simple route, the creative route is rarely easy. Plus, it may be more difficult to get documentation from a credible authority of the work you put into it. The creative route may produce higher quality service sometimes, but it doesn’t have the easy-to-read and easy-to-understand hour log signed by a sponsor that the simple route does. However, the creative route does tend to provide more autonomy and a larger sense of accomplishment. Interestingly, this route can often give you a greater sense of accomplishment even if you are unable to accomplish your goal. That’s because of the more intense problem solving that comes with these kinds of endeavors.

Remember, though, that it’s also easy for colleges and others to look on this kind of community service cynically. Most of the student-founded nonprofits I hear about are tackling problems that other organizations already exist to address, and they usually fall apart as soon as the student goes off to college. People aren’t going to assume you’re doing great things just because you start a club or organization—some will assume you’re just doing it for your own resume.

We obviously need both kinds of community service, and most people do both. There’s nothing wrong with taking the simple route. Be honest with yourself about your motives, your strengths, and your limitations. Remember that to a large degree it’s not as important what you do but how you explain it. There’s also nothing wrong with the creative route. But again, be honest with yourself and be able to explain your choices.

Here’s a process for getting into community service or revamping your current strategy. It’s not a linear process that you do once in order. It’s more of a cycle that you’ll go through over and over throughout your life, not just as a high school student.

1. Think about why you are interested in community service. Be honest with yourself. You likely don’t have a single motive, and you need to understand your overlapping motives. This will give you and the people you’re helping a greater chance of success. Are you performing community service because you are required to complete a certain number of hours for an honor society, your school, or some other organization? Is community service an avenue for you to show gratitude for your own good fortune? Is it a social opportunity for you to spend more time with friends completing projects together? Do you have political or religious ideals, and you want to find ways to put them into action? Are you lonely and looking for ways to be around other people? Understanding the reasons why you want to get involved at all will help you decide what kind of service is best. There are no wrong answers.

2. Define your communities. You’ll be more successful if you approach community service thinking about serving your own communities. These overlapping communities can be geographic—neighborhood, town or city, state, nation. They can be social, political, religious,, and special interest communities. We often think of service in terms of helping other communities, not our own. In some senses this is true, of course, but your service is going to be of higher quality when you think about how you are a part of the community. You may not be in the hospital, but when you volunteer at the hospital you’re helping to strengthen people within your community, and you’re therefore strengthening your own community. The less you think of the people you serve as other, the more useful the service will be to them and for yourself.

3. Who needs help in those communities? Some of these are obvious. The hungry, homeless, and sick in your community need help. People who cannot, for whatever reasons, live independently need help. But lots of people need all kinds of help. When you define your communities more broadly to include not just neighborhood and school, but also your social groups, hobbies and passions, you’ll find more people who can use help and more types of help to give.

4. Who is already helping in those communities? Whatever the problem is you’d like to tackle, it’s not a new one. And there are already people, many of them experts, already working on that problem. Seek them out. Ask how you can help. Learn from them as you help them. Make starting something new from scratch a last-resort idea, not your first idea. The people and groups working to help that part of your community will eventually become another of your communities.

5. How can you contribute? How would you like to help? What have you got that you can contribute to helping? Time and labor? Knowledge and expertise? Materials and supplies? Social connections? Think of all the things you can do to help. This likely includes hours spent working, but don’t limit yourself to those.

When you take this more broad approach to defining community and defining service, you’ll find that you have plenty to do. You’ll find that being a part of a community and serving that community are inseparable. You’ll find that to be true from the family level up to the global level. It won’t be easy or simple, but you’ll have no problem explaining your service on college applications or to anyone else who asks. You’ll know why “day of service” events are really helpful, and you’ll also know why every day is a day of service.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, here are three easy things you can do:

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2. Read these related posts:

   Thinking about community service and college admissions

   Don’t submit that mission trip essay!

   Should you join an honor society?

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