community service reflection

Mae Dempsey
Community Service Essay

For my community service project I chose to volunteer my services at the Foothills Animal Shelter. My jobs were simple; do laundry, clean dishes, wash the kennels and wash the windows. Their mission is to rescue as many needing animals as possible and youthanize as little as possible. If they get too crowded and noone is willing to be a foster owner then some do have to be put down. I had a very small yet very important part in it all. I kept everything thise rescued animals needed clean so they could remain healthy during their stay at FHAS.
I don't know how anyone else felt but it sure as heck pained me and I'll tell you why. Becuase every time I went in and told them I was there for community service they looked at me in discust or confusion; that is until I told them it was for school. Now-a-days everyone assumes that if you are doing community service at all, it's becuase you committed a crime of some sort and you were doing community service to make up for it. We need to volunteer more so when you do community service people look up to you instead of down. I have finished the prodject but I volunteered with the children at my church during second service and during the summer for VBS. Plus I'm doing Outdoorlab where I will get over 100 community service hours. If everyone did it then society would see it as a good thing to do and helpfull.
Without this opportunity society might shut down. Let me explain why... First, without community service workers buisnesses that can't afford to pay enough workers but are very important (like shelters) would eventually have to shut down becuase not everything could be kept up. Second, some community services include picking up litter which is an important part of cleaning up our invironment. If people never picked up the litter, in a few years we would all be swimming in trash. And finally, jails would be overflowing with people who couldn't afford to pay off fines like speeding tickets becuase they had no alternative to paying the fine. Which hurts families and when worse criminals are caught it cuases delimmas with cell spaces.
To sum-up  community services are helpfull and very much needed. But even wuth the people paying off speeding tickets and DUI's, community service shouldn't have to be looked down upon by others as a "last resort" to pay off debts. It should be looks at as a way to help people and the invironment. Even now, where volunteering and community service are literally the same thing, they are look at like the difference between scum and a nice person. They are the same thing put on different terms and it shouldn't be like that.