Time Magazine Article About National Service Movement
The National Service movement in the US is alive and strong. According to a September TIME Magazine article, A Time To Serve - The Case For National Service by Rick Stengel, more than 61 million Americans dedicated 8.1 billion hours to volunteering in 2006, and the nation's volunteer rate has increased by more than 6 percentage points since 1989. Volunteer and civic engagement have not been at this level since the 1970's. Why are so many people volunteering? One explanation, according to the article, is that mostly young people in the US believe that the government is broken. America's youth see a healthcare system that doesn't function, and an education system that fails to teach basic reading and writing skills. Also, since 9/11 many Americans have been motivated to do community service in the US as hundreds of thousands have been deployed overseas to fight two wars.
Community service has also become a means for young people to make a difference at a personal level according to the article. Through organizations like Americorps and City Year (Explore our database of Gap Year Options) US students are tutoring and teaching in urban schools, managing after school programs, cleaning up playgrounds and parks, and helping the elderly.
There are no published figures yet on how many of these volunteers are taking a gap year before or during college, but anecdotal evidence in the media, and on the internet, strongly suggests that volunteering during a gap year is becoming more popular, and accepted with students, their parents, and university admissions offices.
Listen to the NPR interview recorded in August with a University of South Carolina student who took a gap year after high school and served with City Year in Washington DC. The student discussed how her year of service allowed her to give back to children in her community, while teaching her important life experiences. She also comes to realize the importance of college and it leads her to major in social work.
