Change the Homecoming Week volunteering competition

Home Opinion Homepage - Opinion Change the Homecoming Week volunteering competition
Change the Homecoming Week volunteering competition
Whit Wat Way cheers at Mock Rock during Homecoming 2019. | Facebook

According to the Hillsdale College website, the GOAL program “promotes service above self, thereby providing unity and focus to existent campus-wide volunteer activities.”

Is it really “service over self” if the reason you’re volunteering is to help your team win a campus-clout-earning competition? 

“Homecoming Week volunteering is about giving a marketing boost to GOAL programs,” GOAL Community Health Leader Bryna Destefani, a senior, said. “It’s supposed to give volunteers a taste of something they can do on the regular.”

We often forget this objective during a week already overwhelmed by extra commitments and competitions. It’s hard for volunteers to get a taste of what regular volunteering looks like when the programs are overloaded by students seeking any way to get a certain number of hours, in order to earn points, just one week of the year.

Perhaps we should take volunteering out of the Homecoming Week festivities altogether. Or at least change how the competition is run.

Every year during Homecoming Week, teams exhausted by the copious competitions complain about how the week operates. We’re worn out by trying to outdo each other in daily competitions that take more than a day to prep for. 

On top of this, students lose sleep and even skip classes to get more volunteer hours than other teams. This is not how volunteering should be.

According to the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, a volunteer is “a person who does something, especially helping other people, willingly and without being forced or paid to do it.” 

But if we’re writing letters to the elderly, raking leaves, or bowling with handicapped teenagers during Homecoming Week just because our team leaders told us to and it earns points for our dorm or Greek house, we’ve lost sight of the purpose.

If it’s really not about the competition, then the students who volunteered last week should continue to volunteer however they can after the competition is over.

According to Destefani, GOAL volunteering has a different atmosphere during Homecoming Week. The competition puts a lot of pressure on leaders to make work for students seeking to fill hours.

“For the rest of the year it’s not about getting enough hours, it’s about volunteering and getting the job done. Whereas for Homecoming Week, you get rewarded if it takes longer to do the job, and I think that creates a weird psychological dynamic,” Destefani said. “As a GOAL leader, I didn’t want to make more hours of a job that could take less just so I had opportunities to get people involved, but I didn’t want to turn anyone away from volunteering either.”

I can imagine how a recipient of these volunteer projects might find it discouraging and even insulting to get a ton of extra attention during just one week of the year when those helping were also getting points for it — and then never seeing or hearing from those students again.

A good way to improve the system would be to calculate the average volunteer hours, days, or tasks per person per week from the beginning of the semester all the way to Homecoming Week. This way, we can still raise awareness for GOAL while decreasing stress during the competition week.

Although Homecoming is usually early in the semester, this would at least spread the competition out by a month or so in order to encourage consistent volunteering. Once dedicated competitors make volunteering a habit over the first month of the semester, and have formed relationships with GOAL leaders and others in the program, they would be less likely to drop the task after the winners are announced.

This format would also give students more opportunities to volunteer, as some GOAL programs require training and thus can’t take volunteers on a one-time basis.

Junior Zack Niebolt leads a GOAL partnership with Love INC, a nonprofit organization that assists churches in helping those in need of physical or spiritual aid. Niebolt said new volunteers must undergo training to participate, so he’d prefer if the Homecoming Week competition was based on time spent volunteering the entire semester up to that point.

“It takes a few weeks to train new volunteers, so we couldn’t take on volunteers just for one week,” Niebolt said.

Moreover, a longer calculation of volunteering fulfills the ultimate purpose of Homecoming Week: building community. At the beginning of the year, dorm leaders could use this as an opportunity to teach new residents about the GOAL programs and the dorm could bond as they serve the community together a few hours each week.

If we want to include GOAL volunteering in Homecoming Week to show students how they can incorporate it into their everyday life, we should have a competition that rewards consistency, dedication, and concern for the community. Not one week of insanity.

“I think that there can be a frantic energy sometimes of ‘find something to do!’” Destefani said. “You don’t want volunteering to be frantic. You want it to be a joyful competition.”

 

Rachel Kookogey is a junior studying rhetoric and public address. She is the Opinions Editor for the Collegian.