Natalie Delgadillo: Large-scale Volunteer Day fails to provide meaningful experience

My first experience as a volunteer at UCLA involved very little volunteering and lots of awkwardly standing around.

I was supposed to be repainting fences for polo ponies at UCLA’s annual Volunteer Day, but the thing I remember most about that day is not doing much of anything at all.

There were too many student volunteers and not enough fences, and I went home feeling like I had spent my afternoon looking for things to do.

Volunteer Day is organized by genuinely invested Volunteer Center staff and yields worthwhile benefits for many of the sites we visit. Its purpose is to engage and instill the value of volunteerism in all incoming students – but the large, impersonal nature of the event prevents it from fulfilling that purpose.

The massive scale of this year’s event, which deployed more than 6,500 volunteers to 52 sites around Los Angeles on Tuesday, may seem like a virtue. But in fact, it means that many students don’t have much to do and gain little perspective on what volunteering can mean for people and for whole communities.

UCLA should consider altering the scale of Volunteer Day by making it a smaller event where students can sign up for the sites they’re interested in on a first-come, first-served basis. Interested students can sign up for their desired sites either during their orientations or at move-in.

The university should also lessen the emphasis of Volunteer Day as a one-time event, and instead use it as an opportunity to engage students in volunteerism on a continuing basis.

Rather than insisting on the attendance of every student on this single occassion, the university should focus on creating a rewarding experience for volunteers, thus giving them incentive to make volunteerism a part of their UCLA careers.

This approach may decrease the number of people who attend the event, but it will also increase the quality of the experience for everyone involved, meaning that more students may choose to volunteer in the future.

The Office of Residential Life should still encourage as many students as possible to attend, but students are likely to have a more rewarding experience volunteering at sites they’ve chosen to visit.

It seemed that for some UCLA students volunteering Tuesday at Leo Politi Elementary School, where Chancellor Gene Block spoke this year, their services were more beneficial to the university than to the kids. Many of the volunteers were standing there doing very little while Block handed out dozens of bags of school supplies, cameras snapping in the background.

Oscar Peña, a first-year art student, was part of a group of volunteers handing out bags of supplies to every child at the school.

“Someone actually told me to wait (to hand out the bags) so that the chancellor could come and do it,” Pena said. “I was really hoping that (Volunteer Day) would actually be something where each person is doing something useful,” he added.

For all the students standing around and looking lost on Volunteer Day, there were many students who were engaged in useful work. At Leo Politi on Tuesday, volunteers were tutoring kids in math and speaking to them while they waited excitedly in line for their bags of school supplies.

Both UCLA students and the kids looked excited and happy, and the benefits they reaped from the event should not be discounted – but the university should improve the annual event in ways that would make use of every volunteer and make the experience meaningful to everyone.

Such a large volunteer event is undeniably good press for the university, and it might want to keep the event large for that reason. But the huge scale can make the experience very impersonal, and can fail entirely to instill the spirit of volunteerism in first-year students. Giving students a really worthwhile volunteer experience should take precedence over the big numbers and pretty pictures in media outlets the next day.

That meaningful experience can better be facilitated by an event that allows students to choose the sites they’re working at and allows them to keep having rewarding volunteer experiences throughout the year.

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