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| Mary Elizabeth Young Class of 2016 |
In college, free time is a luxury. With work study, scholarship programming, demanding class schedules, and the ever-competitive job market that requires internships and extracurriculars, free time for college students is scarce and community service—sans requirement—is quickly placed on the back burner. Suddenly, mobilizing students for service becomes an issue of convincing them that it is a luxury worth affording.
But how do you convince students community service is a luxury worth affording? This past weekend I, along with other members of UofL’s Engage Lead Serve Board, found that we are not the only group grappling with this question. In fact, we discovered others are asking the same question on campuses all over the country. We were attending the IMPACT National Conference. Designed to bring college student leaders from all across the country together to discuss community engagement, IMPACT was a weekend full of idea exchange, inspiration, and the kind of contagious energy that can only be found at a college conference. But the most profound moment, I believe, did not come while listening to Wendy Spencer, the keynote speaker and CEO of Corporation for National and Community Service, or while watching the sunset over the Pacific Ocean on the edge of Santa Monica Pier—but it came on Friday morning during a small group discussion in a stuffy classroom.
After listening to a brief presentation, we were encouraged to gather with those sitting around us and discuss our respective experiences as student service leaders on campus. It was not long before we discovered a similar frustration: how to sell the service. Whether our families instilled community service in us, we had been served and felt obligated to give back, or a required service event had turned into a life-altering experience, we all discovered we had been sold on service. The issue was that we did not know how to sell it to others.
Then, after a few minutes one young man in the group looked up and said, “Service is about selling the smile”, and suddenly it hit me like a cliché ton of bricks: we cannot sell service via the merits of a resume, by offering coveted “leadership experience,” or even by promising it’ll be fun. The resume will fill up, landing a job will make the leadership experience irrelevant, and not all service is fun. We can sell service by the smile. Smiles are contagious, right? Everyone loves a smile. It is just a matter of showing someone that the only thing better than smiling is seeing another do so and knowing you helped to put it there.
How exactly one can go about selling the smile is a difficult task, and while the concept is abstract to be sure, the realization that it is all about the smile is certainly a great place to start.
Mary Elizabeth Young is a junior McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. She studies English, Spanish, and political science.