Most middle-class Americans could find a neighborhood within 15-minutes drive that could really use their help. But "my adventures in East Palo Alto" just isn't as exciting on a law school application, or a date, as "tales of Eritrea."
You're wrong on that one. Talking about volunteering every weekend in East Palo Alto will get you a lot further on a law school application than your essay on a week in Africa. Admissions staff aren't stupid. Strong commitment to local activism is valued much more than paying large sums of money to travel halfway around the world on a glorified vacatiion.
While I have no idea about Law School applications and what will help you getting in, I do know that as the leader of the volunteering club in high school and spending four years helping in the community was a lot more interesting in college interviews than other things I had on there.
However the opportunity I took in college to go to Africa (North Western Zambia) to build a data entry system and the back end database to digitalize the records of a hospital tended to get a lot more attention when looking for jobs than any of my more relevant internships did.
When I read these articles like the main link I feel happier about what I did. I finished pretty quickly and then spent time training but the majority of the time after the database was built was doing whatever else was needed but my inability to do a lot of the things well they seemed to tolerate with such kindness since what I was good at was already completed.
3rd-world volunteerism involves working without any of the amenities you take for granted (e.g. using different toilets), so it's not much of a vacation, and it involves helping people who are a lot worse off materially than "ghetto" kids. Unless law schools started getting nativist recently, of course ...
It's not voluntary if it's a requirement to get into the school/frat.
It's more like free forced labor that most of the time is not even needed by the non-profit but hey the kids need certain hours so let's make the move garbage from one trash can to the other all day and if they finish early make them move it back.
Perhaps you were going for humor but locally some (mostly religious) high schools have mandatory required volunteer (LOL) graduation requirements, and criminal court "community service" also means work at the same recycling center, so you end up with a weird and probably very unhealthy mixture of ex-cons and teens at the recycling center basically "doing time" moving stuff from one dumpster to another all day. The weirdest part of the whole situation is its perceived as a social good.
I happen to know a few "criminals" and they're not bad people they just choose to do shady stuff. Although I've met a few that i instinctively distanced myself from because you can tell they're always out to trick you or get something from you it's usually not that simple.
Some of them were even punished way out of proportion to the severity of their crime.
I don't know if most kids have the skill to deal with these people and since the crafty ones come off as overly friendly they might even get lured in.
It's probably not idea to mix clueles teens with street smart criminals.
Otherwise sheltered teens likely have at least enough family resources and support that a couple hours of supervised contact isn't going to turn them into rampaging criminals, and dealing with people who aren't on a track straight into college and then into elite employment will make them more grounded.
In other words, I think community service works.
You may feel that some (maybe even most) people's motivations are less pure than others, but that doesn't make their actions "not volunteer work".
> It's more like free forced labor that most of the time is not even needed by the non-profit
H4H: You sign up, you show up, you learn a few things. Labour is still the biggest part of construction so your contribution is noted and essential.