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...to take impoverished people in long-term care at Goldwater Memorial Hospital to mass. I visited with them, asked how they had been feeling, and shared stories of their lives. They wanted to know how we were doing in school and in our extracurricular activities.
My regular buddy on those Sundays was Mr. Clarence Chambers, who was confined to a rickety old wooden wheelchair and rarely had family visitors. Every Sunday when I walked through the swinging doors of the bleak long hallway, Mr. Chambers welcomed me as a son. He always wanted to know how my track meets had gone, and he was especially pleased when, in the spring of my sophomore year, I brought him my gold medal from the Penn Relays and asked him to keep it for me. Every now and then I have a twinge of regret about not having that medal to show my own son. But it was a small sacrifice for a volunteer to make. And Mr. Chambers gave me much more than I could ever have given him.
Hampton,Virginia, 2002: Youth Civic Engagement
Today, some four decades later, I sit in my home office wearing a T-shirt, emblazoned "Volunteer Superstar,"that was given to me earlier this year by Alicia Tundidor, a 10th-grade African-American "youth commissioner" from Hampton,Virginia. She made the gift during a city council meeting that was packed to overflowing with young people to proclaim Youth Service Day and recognize the city's efforts to build what she described as "a youth civic engagement system."
For the past 10 years, Hampton, a city of 146,000 with a modest...
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The volunteering decision; what prompts it? What sustains it?, September 22, 2002
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