How Impacting Your Community Impacts Your Child

/

Looking to include your child in your own volunteer or donation efforts? Let’s talk about what that looks like and why it’s important to involve our children starting at a young age.

What does it mean to impact my community?

When you are engaging with the needs of your community, that means you know:

  • The physical, social, or economic environments that you want to impact

  • How your time or donations would improve the outcome for residents in that community

Community efforts are not synonymous with “charity,” which we sometimes understand as someone with time and resources temporarily helping someone who is “less fortunate.” When we’re caring for our community, no one is the “hero.” What we’re actually doing is taking responsibility for supporting our community in an informed, long lasting way.

Why is important for my child to be involved in community efforts?

Skills for School:
The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement found that children who volunteer are more successful in school, because they are able to observe and develop skills such as “planning, working in groups, interacting with people who are different from themselves, and defining and solving complex problems.”

Emotional Skills:
Involving your children in community efforts creates the opportunity for them to see how certain issues affect people in difficult ways, like food insecurity, housing insecurity, illness, etc. But by helping to support these folks alongside their family, children begin to see that even during hardship, they have agency in how they can treat others kindly and make a difference with their actions.

Knowledge and Awareness:
Finding a cause that is important to your family gives space for you to learn together. Not just about social issues, but things like your local area, its history, the people in your local government, community helpers in public spaces, and new skills.

How do we start?

1 ) Decide what you can contribute.

When thinking about how you can contribute to a community, you can usually contribute one or more of these three things:

  • Time

  • Money

  • Items you already have

2 ) Learn about the needs of your local community.

What are the greatest needs within your city or your neighborhood? Look for grassroots organizations that are local to where you live and especially those that support underserved communities. You can search for them using online resources such as The Action Network or One Good Deed Chicago. Or, just ask people you know. Once you find an organization, make sure you know about their mission, the people who are backing them, and who they are affecting.

3 ) Get started and take action!

For more tips on how to take action with your family, check out: