Encouraging Community Service

If more of us performed even a tiny bit of regular community service, the world would be a much better place.

Perhaps it’s idealized thinking, but I believe that if everyone in our country dedicated themselves to just one form of community service, many of our social ills would retreat.

Such service doesn’t need to be a monumental effort. It can be something simple like driving an older person to a doctor’s appointment, staffing an entry gate at a neighborhood street fair, or volunteering to tutor kids after school. There are community involvement opportunities everywhere.

I was at a community event yesterday here in San Francisco. It was run entirely by a large team of volunteers. The event was a joyous community celebration that also happened to raise thousands of dollars for a selected nonprofit. The event was a perfect demonstration of the power of community service. In fact, one of the producers of the event pointed out in his remarks to the crowd that the origin of the word community itself embraces the notion of community service.

In short, as this New World Encyclopedia entry describes, community means “service performed together.”

The word community is derived from the Latin communitas (meaning the same), which is in turn derived from communis, which means “common, public, shared by…