Volunteerism Essential To The Success Of Latino Youth

If you’re reading this, it’s likely you form part of  the massive cluster of former beneficiaries of student initiatives and scholarships that were developed by community-based Latino organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the National Hispanic Institute (NHI), the Hispanic Scholarship Fund (HSF), ASPIRA, regional Hispanic chambers of commerce across the country, or many others.

You might even be one of the approximately five million Latino volunteers providing an average of 50 hours of service each year. Contemporary Latino non-profit organizations, congregations and community groups struggle to harness and enlarge this sector of active Latinos and their families. The participation of volunteers is essential for the functioning of these groups, the execution of their programming, and the financing of their initiatives to serve community members.

Most of these Latino organizations have long histories of promoting pathways for volunteerism, mentorship opportunities, and enhanced civic involvement among their current participants, scholarship recipients and alumni. This combination of early student cultivation and greater levels of community involvement have been correlated to heightened degree completion rates by almost every major Latino organization that serves Latino students directly. And, higher education levels are predictors of greater volunteer rates, particularly within the U.S. Latino community.

Each year less than 15% of Latinos sixteen years of age and older volunteer through or for an organization, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most serve in capacities to benefit faith-based groups and youth initiatives, and the three most common types of service are:

• Fund raising
• Collecting and distributing food
• Tutoring

Unfortunately, Latinos when compared to other racial groups in the U.S. have a lower propensity for volunteering and are almost half as likely to volunteer than other Americans.

Our community requires greater levels of participation in these systems for community service since this entire apparatus and these rates of participation must clearly maintain pace with the rate of growth occurring within the U.S. Latino population as it more than doubles within the next few decades.

Former beneficiaries of scholarships for Latino students and recipients of early preparation for higher education, now is the time to reengage the Latino organization that served you all of those years ago. As we look ahead to the next academic year, we can all realize opportunities to infuse these groups with our resources and time because the current U.S. Latino student population is burgeoning across primary and secondary schools. Each of us can play a greater role in the long-term development of our younger community members and provide them with additional advantages for success in both the classroom and the community.

Not only can we prepare them for success in higher education, we can also challenge them to be strategically prepared for the regional and transnational Latino social and economic landscapes that await them during the years beyond the completion of their various degree programs. Furthermore, among the alumni and scholarship recipients of the full spectrum of U.S. Latino organizations in operation, we should each challenge ourselves to create new entities to serve and embolden our next generation of intellectuals, entrepreneurs, philanthropists and community leaders in a manner that extends the legacies and triumphs of our predecessors well into the 21st century.

Joseph P. A. Villescas, Ph.D. is an independent consultant, writer and instructor who conducts extensive investigations on Latino and other multidimensional populations that explore trends in their educational development, media consumption, internet usage, voting behaviors, racial categorization, organizational capacities and readiness for future leadership roles in community settings. He is also the founder and owner of Villescas Research, Media & Instruction, LLC.