013. Ideas for Getting Kids Engaged In Service

Summertime is a great time to help kids learn the benefits of serving those around them or with other organizations in their community.  On this episode I share five of my own ideas anyone can use (and that I've used myself!) to help engage your kids in service.  Give it a listen to hear doable ways any family can try this summer to teach their kids about the benefits of giving back.

A great website I mention on the podcast to search for service opportunities in your community:
JustServe

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Transcript

Melissa: You're listening to the Do Something More podcast. And this is episode 13 with ideas for getting kids engaged with service. Welcome to the Do Something More Podcast, a service oriented show where we highlight the helpers who inspire us all to do something more. I'm your host, Melissa Draper. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Do Something More podcast. And for today's episode, it's summertime. We have kids at home and I want to just get into some ideas for how you can engage kids in service. I think especially at summertime is a great time. If you wanted to do this more in your own family or wanted some ideas for how to make service a part of your family culture, or you just want to teach your kids some of those good principles and things that we learn from giving back and giving of ourselves to service, this is the episode for you. I'm going to share a few things to hopefully inspire you and to give you some ideas for your own kids, for your grandkids, or for kids that you love and know. But before we get into that, I would just like to start by saying if you've been enjoying this podcast, if you've listened to a few of the episodes and it's brought some good things and enrichment to your life, to please go and think about leaving a review. Reviews are how podcasts often get seen and discovered by other listeners. And so a review would be so helpful to me as a podcast host if you found this podcast to be a benefit to you or another option, if you've enjoyed this podcast, if there's a particular episode that you've listened to, we've already covered a lot of different topics, a lot of different things. And if one of those someone you know came to mind while you were listening, I would just ask you to please pass that on to them, share a link to the podcast with them and just say, hey, I thought of you, thought you would benefit from listening to this. So if you've been listening to the podcast you've loved and enjoyed it so far, doing one of two of those things would mean a whole lot to me. So thank you. But we're going to get into this now for ideas for helping kids to engage with service. I have five different principles and ideas that I want to share with you today, and some of them might sound familiar if you've already been listening to the podcast we've maybe touched on or talked about some of them. So my first idea is to simply say yes. I know a lot of times in our culture we talk about being able to set healthy boundaries and to learn how to say no. And that is important. But I would also say to learn and teach your kids how to say yes. There are so many opportunities that pop up where we are needed, where our time or our talents or even just our warm body there willing to work are needed. And this is kind of a culture that we've developed in our family. That's one of my values. It's very important to me to be one of those people that can be depended on or to be willing to show up and and help and to give assistance when it's needed whether it's glamorous work or not. And so many times me and my husband have said to our kids the mantra we've used is drapers are doers. We are doers. We get up and do and we help when we can help simply by looking for those opportunities and teaching our children to say yes. And my children are normal children. They sometimes push back or don't want to do some of those things just like any other children but pointing out to them the opportunity we have to help and give assistance or many times just pointing out to them the things that we enjoy in life and how it's important that everybody pitches in. So one example of that is at our church it is often each congregation in our church rotates through cleaning the meeting house where we meet for our church meetings. And so our kids know that when that sign up comes around our family is going to take a Saturday. They do it Saturday mornings and all of us are going to show up and we're going to help. And they know that. And we've done it so many times that usually we don't get pushback now they just know that we're going to help in that way. And it's great to have that conversation with them to say that we love this beautiful building that we get to use and meet in every Sunday and what a pleasure it is to have the opportunity to clean it and to help take care of it and to show our appreciation for it. So that's one example, lots of other examples will pop up. I know sometimes my kids will get texts from their friends about opportunities or things that maybe their family is doing or their friend wants to invite them along. And I encourage them to say yes to those to say yes to those opportunities to serve or to help a friend or to go along with a friend's idea of what they're wanting to do to help someone else out. Other times that saying yes might simply just be in the home. It might be saying yes to mom to help her out with something. Saying yes to a sibling when they come and ask you for help instead of just acting annoyed and pushing them aside. So the saying yes applies to lots of different things but it's a skill and something you can talk about with your family is to look for those opportunities for us to say yes and to be engaged and to help and to give back. And just teaching that principle to children, I think, can go a long way in helping them learn how to look for service opportunities on their own and to want to be doers and to help. So that's number one. Number two we've already talked about in one or two episodes, I think, is this great website called Justserve.org. I love JustServe. It's a great resource for anyone that's wanting to be more engaged in service, either on their own, with their family, or in an organization or as a community. You get onto Justserve.org, you put in your area code or where you live, and it will list a myriad of projects that you can be involved in. Some of these projects are just simple one time things or very simple things. Some might be ongoing and some might be things you can do on your own or maybe with a group. Some are things you have to go somewhere. Some are ones you can do at your home on your computer. And so I love getting onto Just Serve and helping my kids get on there and look through projects to choose for themselves. That's a great way to help kids get engaged in services. Let them think about what they want to be involved in. Let them choose what they might want to help with. So, for example, my daughter has used Just Serve a couple of times in the past few months. One, she had to plan an activity for her youth group at church and wanted to do a service project. And so I reminded her about Justserve.org, and she got on there and found a great project that she could do with the other girls in her group. And I helped her get some of the supplies for it. But really that was all I did. She organized and did everything, and then she used it again. A couple of months later at school, she was doing a project for her history class. And I love this. The teacher had asked them to do some kind of service or project to go along with someone that they were learning about in history and basically to show them that there was a way they could make a difference, just like those they learn about in history made a difference. And so my daughter had learned about an individual that had done a lot of things with education, and so she wanted to do something to do with again. And without prompting from me this time, because of the past experience, she got on JustServe all on her own. And she found an organization that was accepting school packets for children in Ukraine. And so she decided she wanted to do that. Her and a friend did it together, and I donated some money for them to do that, and they also donated some of their own and were able to buy some supplies to put together these school packets. So those are just a couple of examples, but justserve.org is a great resource if you're wanting your kids to engage in service, encourage them to go on there and to find some projects that they could be involved in and do. And that kind of leads into my third idea for how to engage kids with service, talking about my daughter helping to pay for those school supplies. So something this is more about teaching your children the concept of giving back in a monetary way, of giving of some of your earnings to charity or to organizations. And so something me and my husband have done a few times with our kids is many times, especially during the summer, they have jobs and they're earning money and we talk about using some of your money to help other people. And so we've done this a few times. One of the times I did it, they were a little younger then. And what I did is I pulled together different organizations that are in the community and I knew and were aware of that they could donate to. And I showed them the websites and showed them all the different organizations. I think I had an animal shelter and primary Children's, which is a children's hospital here, a humanitarian fund, just all sorts of different things. And I encouraged them to pick one of those organizations and to choose on their own how much money they wanted to donate to help with that organization's cause. And then I told them whatever they chose to donate, me and their dad would match it and then we would go and we'd donate to that together as a family. Some of them, I remember we drove to the organization and they were so proud to give them their money. Others, they were farther away or it was more practical to mail them the donation, but they filled it all out and everything. That has been a great way to help them learn that concept of giving some of your abundance to help others. I know I've done this with my teenagers as well, the junior high and high school they usually have around Christmas time, some organization that they're helping or they're collecting funds or things for. And I've again encouraged my teenage children to really ponder and think about how much they would like to donate to that cause and then tell them I will match whatever they choose to donate and they can do it all on their own and give it to the school. And I love those opportunities to teach my children that concept. So that's another thing you can think about with engaging your kids in service is help them learn the benefits of earning money through hard work and then of even giving some of that to a cause that means something to them. And especially, I think all kids, but especially teenagers, love to be contributing to a cause and to let them choose and do the research themselves sometimes if they're old enough on what they want to donate to, can be really powerful too. So that's point number three. And then going on to point number four, along with what I was saying about teenagers loving to join a cause. So this idea is more probably for your older kids, for your teenagers. And this idea has not been my own, but to take the idea, if you're familiar with Eagle Scout projects and many times with those projects, they pick something that they have some personal connection to and then they organize a project around that. And so if you're part of the scouting program, go ahead and stick with that. I think it's great. But I think any parents can take that model with their own child. And so take that and encourage your child to do some kind of big project, kind of help them set ahead of time how many hours they should spend on this project. If you want to give them parameters or help them figure those out and then encourage them to pick something that means something to them, maybe there's something in the community they've noticed and wanted to help with. Maybe there's an organization that is fighting a cause that's really important to them. Or maybe they've already experienced some kind of tragedy in their own life or something that's been hard for them and they want to help. Lift. Other people that are going through a similar experience or whatever it is, and encourage them to do their own project, to draft it all out, plan how they're going to go through each step, how much time it will take them through the summer, maybe, or if they need to reach out for help from other people or organizations. And just really give your kids the opportunity to do their own project. Which I said, that idea comes from the Eagle Scout project idea. But again, I think those older kids and teenagers, they want to be part of a cause, there are things they already have noticed and feel so strongly about and teaching them again that they have the power to act on those thoughts and feelings they've had and to do something to make a difference can be so powerful. So that's point number four. And now that takes us to my last and final point, point number five. And this one is to make it a family affair. So make service and serving together a family activity or something you can do together as a family. So maybe on an evening instead of going to the pool or playing at the park or all those fun summer things we like to do as a family, which I hope you will still do, but maybe on one of those evenings instead, as a family, you choose to do an activity together to serve in your community. And these things don't have to be huge. This is again, something that our family has done often and what things I've tried to instill my own children and again, I said this in my first episode of the podcast. I am not a perfect individual. I am not wanting to make it sound like I'm going around doing grandiose things. Really. The things that we've done as a family are so simple and they've simply just been thoughts that we've had to reach out and to help those in our community. So some ideas of things that we've done is we've made some simple dinners together. I love to make burritos, that's an easy one to make for people, and a dinner that they can either use right away, put in their fridge, or even freeze. And so we've done that. We've all sat there together making several burrito dinners and then we went and delivered them to families that we thought could use or could like a dinner. And really, it doesn't matter. Everybody would love every mother would be appreciative of a dinner and not having to make it for her family, but we've done that. Another one we've done together is to help people in need with yard work. So it can be elderly or other families that needed, maybe ones that have been out of town or ones that we know are going through a hard time or had things they're going through. And we've just gone as a family, shown up and worked on their yard, on weeding or mowing or whatever it is they need done. Many times we've done visits to elderly couples and individuals in our neighborhood and that's super easy. We just go and we visit them and talk with them and enjoy spending time with them. I remember one time when I was doing different service with my kids. One time we just went to the grocery stores in town and they put all the carts back that people had left all over the place. It was a super simple activity, but it was fun to go do that together as a family. And I think it was just a fun activity and taught them a few things. So again, these activities don't have to be huge that you do as a family, but to just spend some time together. Serving can be so powerful as they see you do it and the example that you set as a parent, that trickles down to them. And we've made such great memories doing that together too. Again, it's not always perfect. There's times where kids are squabbling or it's not all roses and sunshine, but we've also had opportunities to really make good memories together. And service as a group is always a powerful thing. I think it can be great to have those opportunities to serve together. So those are my five points for you, to help kids engage with service, especially this summer, but really at any time. So number one was to teach them to say yes to be brave and say yes to those opportunities that come up for them to engage and to help out. Number two was to check out the website justserve.org or let your kids get on there and browse it and find projects that they could work on themselves or even you could do as a family. Number three was to teach your children about donating to charities and to organizations and to help them take some of the money that they might be earning through jobs this summer and to take some of that to give to an organization that means something to them. Number four was more for your older kids and teenagers is to give them a big project or help them put a big project together of service that they could do kind of fashioning. It like an Eagle Scout project is the idea but letting them come up with a way that they can serve and spend some hours serving. And number five is to make it a family affair. Make doing service simple service activities together some of the things that you do to build memories and spend time together as a family. So those are my five simple tips. Of course, they are not meant to be all inclusive. I think there are so many ways, so many other ideas out there and so I would love if you want to send me in your ideas, I'd love to hear them. My email is in the podcast description so feel free to send some of those in. Or if you are following us along on social media, on Instagram, we are at Dosomethingmore podcast or on Facebook at the Do Something More podcast. Feel free to share your ideas there as well. I love to hear others ideas for how they've engaged their kids or children in service and help them to learn those concepts. And just as a final note, I think it's always great too to talk about it with your kids after we've done some of these projects. Talk about the experiences they had, talk about what they were feeling every project and every service opportunity. You're not necessarily feeling fuzzy feelings the whole time. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes there's challenges you have to work through and you can talk about all of those things. Just let them share with you their experiences and what they were, how they worked through some of those feelings and challenges, but then also how they felt, or the good feelings that they had as well. Or what they thought about having the opportunity to help or give back in different ways. So that's my last encouragement is to just talk about it with kids when they have those opportunities. Let them share their experiences with you and share your own thoughts and feelings with them as well. So those are my ideas to help our children be engaged with service. Would love to hear any ideas that our listeners have as well and I just want to say it's a worthy cause. It's a worthy effort to be involved in. It hasn't always been easy to teach my own children about service or to get them engaged in a project or have a desire to work towards those things. But it definitely has always been worth it, and it's definitely worth the struggle that might be there sometimes. And it's always worth the good feelings that we and experiences that we share together. So thank you so much for being here. I'll see you next time.