Volunteering for a service or a job without asking for any remuneration is a very noble and selfless deed. Some students these days are very keen on volunteering for various kinds of causes and jobs for various reasons. Many people do it for their own personal satisfaction as it makes them feel good if they are running for a good cause. Other people have different motivations for their acts. They might be trying to impress other people by showing them that they care. These people can include their parents, girlfriend/boyfriend, spouses, teachers, or employers. Many people do volunteer work because it looks good on their resume. In any case, volunteer work is good because even though it might help people satisfy their personal and selfish agendas, it also ends up helping the society and the community on the whole.
Young adults can choose various different kinds of volunteer work today. These can include clean-up tasks in parks, provide road and bridge repair work, and assist with environmental land and water reclamation projects. Other services may include assisting the mentally and physically handicapped, children at risk, and the elderly and sick. This type of work is suitable only for select people. After doing some research about this, I realized that in essence, some people are inappropriate for community service placement. Those individuals may include offenders who are psychotic or highly disturbed, heavily addicted to drugs or alcohol, serious sex offenders, illiterate, or facing a crisis situation. Accordingly, carefully matching people to community service assignments is crucial. Harding specified that when there are appropriate matches, instances of unacceptable behavior are extremely rare.
Most of the volunteer work is done as community service. Community services are identified by an institution of higher education, through formal or informal consultation with local nonprofit, governmental, and community-based organizations, as designed to improve the quality of life for community residents, particularly low-income individuals, or to solve particular problems related to their needs. These include the need in fields like health care, child care, literacy training, education (including tutorial services), welfare, social services, transportation, housing and neighborhood improvement, public safety, crime prevention and control, recreation, rural development, and community improvement. Community service can also include work in service opportunities or youth corps as defined in the National and Community Service Act of 1990. Support services to students with disabilities; and activities in which a student serves as a mentor for such purposes as tutoring, supporting educational and recreational activities; and counseling, including career counseling are also included in the work done for community service.
This means that people who volunteer for community services are not just helping themselves, but they are also helping the society. For example if a person decides to do community service with law enforcement, he or she is helping in the reduction of crime. If a person is volunteering for a trash cleanup in the society, he or she is helping the environment. If a person is volunteering in schools etc in order to teach children, he or she is helping the community by providing education. Overall, whatever volunteer work or community service that a person decides to do, it basically does two things. One is the personal development of the volunteer (this may be in terms of the personal satisfaction that a person receives or in terms of personal development). The one thing is that whatever the motives are of the volunteer, volunteer works helps the community and the society.