Coming Full Circle: Our First Horizons Graduates Become Volunteers
Posted on by Jenny Tracy, Executive Director
If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else. - Booker T. Washington
My first step into “work” was as a volunteer. After college, I joined the Peace Corps as an Environmental Education Volunteer in Kazakhstan. Having studied Russian in college, I was eager to see what I might contribute in this faraway place. How might I help local English teachers improve their language? How might I explain the environment to students at school?
But what I accomplished was done as we, not I. My local counterpart, a Biology teacher, and I led an Ecology Club. A local English teacher and I led preschool English lessons and trainings for other teachers. A local coach and I coached (and played) in basketball tournaments around their country. The people I met taught me, and those I came to help certainly helped me more, allowing me to feel at home as a young person far from home, inviting me to meals and family events, teaching me their culture, their practices, their language.
You might have seen the movie Volunteers, featuring a young Tom Hanks who lands in Thailand by mistake after finishing his Yale degree (Well, I watched it in the Peace Corps. It’s very funny and also quite dated). It also reveals, I think, what volunteering so often reveals for all of us: we gain so much personally through giving our time and talents to others.
At Horizons, volunteers are part of the fabric of our program, and our high school volunteers say it better in their blogs than I can. Westley, who started volunteering in seventh grade, reflected that while he gave the children his time and care, “it feels like they have given me something even greater.” Zoe began the summer before ninth grade and watched her students light up over a tough math problem and a first chapter book. “That’s when I knew I was meant to be a teacher,” she wrote, and she is now headed to college to study Elementary Education. And Sarah, who found her footing as a swim instructor, is looking forward to the day she can “watch the kids I have worked with become volunteers themselves.”
Last weekend, I got a glimpse of that day. I led our first Horizons graduates in their first volunteering training. Five of our graduates attended - Ahna, Ayite, Kimberly, Ma'Raya and Naomi - were there, and they were so eager. Over donuts and orange juice, we went over our volunteer handbook and talked about how to support students academically: how to simplify a worksheet, how to make a reading passage look less daunting. We also walked through scenarios they might encounter and when they should turn to an adult for support. These are young people who spent their summers on the receiving end of that kind of patient, thoughtful help. Now they are learning to offer it.
The gift comes full circle, and I can’t wait to see them in action!