An insight into student volunteering

It is not uncommon to see juniors Sammy Shufton and Nick Tom walking through the hallways singing songs to the tune of an acoustic guitar. Besides playing for friends and bystanders, these students have found a way to give their love of music back to the back to communities, in addition to Aragon. They, along with other Aragon students, have discovered the joy of volunteering.

Tom and Shufton go on a monthly visit to Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco.

Laguna Honda Hospital is a therapeutic community and rehabilitation center which provides nursing and rehabilitation services to low-income seniors and adults with disabilities.

“What we do is we take our guitars and ukuleles and we walk around to the different wards and we perform music for the residents,” says Tom.

“I do it because I love music,” explains Tom. “By going to the Laguna Honda, I feel like it gives me an opportunity to share what I do with people who don’t get a chance to have that much variety in their daily activities. Some people won’t react at all. Some people smile and sing along. But we’ve been cussed out before. We’ve been told that we look like the Backstreet Boys—that was exciting.”

Like Tom and Shufton, sophomore Derek Leong also volunteers in San Francisco at a place called City Teams.
“We put on banquets,” says Leong. “The rooms are really warm, which is great because San Francisco can be really cold. It’s a soup kitchen, except glorified.”

“I go there every month, except I skipped last month, so I feel really bad,” says Leong. “City Teams is a non-profit organization that basically keeps homeless people overnight, feeds them, clothes them and whatnot. Sometimes if there is a serious case, [City Teams] tries to help send people to rehab. If someone wants to get a hold of their life, they can start this three month process when they talk to a mentor who has already gone through [similar ordeals], and they help them get through everything.”

Leong’s volunteer work at City Teams includes a variety of jobs, such as singing, cooking and serving food and even going out to talk to the homeless people to try to understand their problems.

Junior Kate Blood has been a part of a youth group of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints since she was 12.

“We recently did something with the Second Harvest food bank,” says Blood. “But we generally do general service. We went to a shelter network a couple times. We baby sat kids while the parents went to a meeting and we cleaned up there. And we do a food drive every year.”

Many Aragon students volunteer locally around the Bay Area, but senior Kalie San Felipe gives back to Aragon by volunteering on campus.

“The club I work with is Aragon’s recycling club,” says Felipe. “The goal of the club is essentially altruistic–to decrease the amount of trash Aragon students throw into landfills and to educate students on the importance of recycling. As president, I am responsible for gathering volunteers and making sure they are diligently emptying their bins,” she explains. “Overflowing bins would defeat the purpose of the club. I also try to immerse club members in other environmental projects, one of the more recent ones being the E-waste drive.”

Furthermore, members of the garden club and Environmental Impact Committee, which is the “brain” of all environmental projects at Aragon, have taken on projects like selling reusable water bottles and sandwich bags, and sending transparencies to a recycling center rather than throwing them away.

Freshman Matthew Lentz found volunteer work with the help of some family connections.

“My mom works at this elementary school, ‘Serendipity’,” says Lentz. “I go and I help with recess sometimes, I watch the kids, sometimes I’ll help them with their homework, and I’ll also clean the classroom. I help [the students] with their homework, I’ll help with the after-school care. I tutor them, basically.”

When asked why they volunteer, every student essentially had the same response: “It makes you feel good.”

“You find yourself when you lose yourself in service,” says Blood.” If you forget about yourself for a second, and help someone, you can get a lot from that.”