Volunteer hours hard for east Bradenton students to find

Jessica Thompson, a senior at Lakewood Ranch High, had 20 hours left to complete her volunteer hours for the Bright Futures program when she started the school year.

“I was just looking for anything I could do, whether that was online events or sending things in the mail like writing letters,” Thompson said. “I knew I had to get in my final hours.”

Thompson, along with hundreds of other students, is struggling to find volunteer opportunities because several nonprofits are either not allowing volunteers or are limiting the number of volunteers due to COVID-19.

“[Volunteer opportunities] are not as easily accessible as they normally are,” said Meghan Sugalski, the adviser of Lakewood Leaders. “I have to say that a lot of [students] have stepped up.”

Lakewood Leaders is a club at the school that facilitates community service between high school students and the schools, nonprofits and churches in the area. 

Presidents of school clubs and organizations, such as Lakewood Leaders, Key Club and National Honor Society, are working with their club officers to find new opportunities for their members because most of the organizations require a certain amount of service hours to be completed by a deadline.

For example, students hoping to receive a Florida Academic Scholars scholarship, which is the biggest scholarship for Bright Futures, need to complete 100 hours over their four years in high school.

Most volunteer opportunities stem from large events, such as runs and walks for a cause, dance marathons and festivals. As a result, students are volunteering individually rather than in a group and are finding organizations they can continually volunteer with rather than participating in one-time events.

Many students have turned to Feeding Tampa Bay and Southwest Florida Therapy Animals because they’re flexible in scheduling and are allowing students to volunteer in person multiple times.

Sugalski prefers that students choose an organization and work with that organization on a regular basis.

“When you continuously return to something, it creates a deeper relationship,” Sugalski said. “It creates another [reference] for a college recommendation — a non-teacher or work manager — who can write them a recommendation and discuss their work ethic, … their true personality and their abilities.”

Students have been creative in coming up with new ways to volunteer, including virtual opportunities.

Ashley Zeitz, the president of Braden River High School’s Key Club, worked with the club’s officers to show appreciation for teachers in the week before school started. The officers made flowers and wrote thank-you notes.

“I love walking into some of my teachers’ classrooms and seeing a little flower that I made them,” said Zeitz, who is a senior.

Braden River’s Key Club is in the process of setting up a virtual tutoring program with other schools in Lakewood Ranch because they can’t go to the schools in person.

Members of Lakewood Leaders are getting involved virtually with the elementary schools by recording themselves reading books and sending the recording to schools, so elementary students can still feel connected to the high schoolers.

Zeitz connected Key Club members with virtual options, such as Color a Smile and Smithsonian Transcriptions.

Color a Smile is a nonprofit based out of New Jersey. Anyone can print out coloring pages from the Color a Smile website, color them and send them back to the nonprofit, which will distribute them to nursing homes and troops overseas.

Volunteers for Smithsonian Transcriptions help make historical documents and biodiversity data more accessible.