Tag: volunteering with kids

The winter holidays are approaching, which means many parents are looking for ways to engage with their children during the long vacation. My previous food pantries always saw a noticeable increase in the number of families, or parents reaching out on behalf of their older children, looking to volunteer at this time of year.

When it is done well, parents and children leave their volunteer service feeling enriched and impactful. When it is not handled gracefully, it can be harmful to everyone.

As a food pantry manager, I’ve fielded calls from dozens of parents looking for opportunities to help their children “appreciate how fortunate they are.” Essentially, the lesson they are trying to convey is how lucky their children are that they don’t have to use a food pantry. Framed this way, it emphasizes an “us/them” dichotomy that rarely fosters empathy or understanding of hunger. This attitude reinforces the attitude that visiting a food pantry is shameful, and further perpetuates the myth that poverty is a matter of luck or hard work, rather than systemic oppression and inequality.

I also regularly hear from families wanting to spend December helping the “less fortunate members of their community.” Again, this language emphasizes the differences between them and food pantry clients and may cement them in the minds of their children. Without thoughtful guidance, attitudes like this can perpetuate harmful attitudes around racism, poverty, and inequality.

This type of volunteering is performative and biased, even if well-intentioned. Poverty is not something to be gawked at, and this attitude is harmful to anti-hunger organizations working to emphasize dignity and the belief that everyone deserves to eat.

Volunteering as a family can be a hugely positive and formative experience, but service must be treated with delicacy and respect. Far too often, the people using services like food pantry clients are treated as a vehicle for volunteers to complete their “good deeds” or as examples to illustrate a specific assumption.

There are specific steps that parents and nonprofit organizations can take to fight these tendencies, increase the impact of their volunteer services, and help children develop an understanding of social justice that empowers them to be future changemakers.

For parents:

• Find volunteer projects that your children are excited about. I grew up volunteering for the National Letter Carriers Food Drive for over a decade, sorting food at the post office into boxes as the mail carriers brought it in during the annual event. My family had so much fun that we took over management of our post office and staffed the team exclusively with our school friends and their families. Finding activities that your children enjoy can foster long-term interest in volunteering and passion for the issues you’re working on (twenty years later, I’m doing the same work!)

• I encourage families with children under twelve to pursue roles that don’t provide direct service to clients. This helps ensure that children don’t interact with clients until they have the maturity to do appropriately. There are still many ways to participate in impactful service like repacking bulk foods at a food bank, managing a food drive, or sorting food boxes or toy donations. These offer great opportunities to have conversations with children about how they are helping- and to introduce the systemic barriers that prevent people from accessing these resources. Parents don’t need to be experts on this subject- but they should put effort into finding an organization aligned with these values.

• When children are old enough to do direct service with clients, it needs to be voluntary.  The youth who thrive while volunteering are the ones who want to come. Sullen and grumpy children working with people living with hunger degrades the experience for everyone. When parents focus on the lesson or morality of service with reluctant children, it furthers their disengagement and disinterest, and I’ve seen this manifest many times as disrespect towards clients.

For pantries and anti-hunger organizations:

• Be clear about and enforce age restrictions for volunteer roles. Almost every time I have been instructed by leadership to make an exception for a donor or volunteer’s grandchild, I find myself acting more as babysitter than pantry manager, or doing damage control with clients. It’s not worth it. If you can make some positions child-friendly- awesome! It’s also okay to have roles that are exclusively for adults.

• Model language that combats the idea that you’re helping the “less fortunate” or “needy” in your marketing, literature, and conversations with volunteers. Your community will repeat your words, so deliberately discussing the systemic nature of poverty helps volunteers and potential volunteers adopt this idea over outdated assumptions.

• In your volunteer orientation and training materials, introduce the root causes of hunger using language accessible to a twelve-year old. When there are children present, you won’t have to make any changes, and it’s likely that your adult volunteers will also benefit from the simplest framing of this immensely complex issue. This ensures everyone has a clear understanding of your mission and goals in a way that empowers your community.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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