Walking into the weekly Wednesday tabling at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), I have noticed many club representatives marketing their organizations by offering free food, goodies or merchandise to make students join.
However, most students are attracted by one particular perk: opportunities for volunteer hours.
With the large pre-med community that thrives at UCR, most students look at this perk as one that heavily sells an organization to them. While volunteering was once driven by a genuine commitment to serving the community, it is increasingly becoming just a box to check on resumes and applications, losing its true meaning and undermining its significance.
Primarily, institutional pressure plays a large role in this shift. From high school onward, students are encouraged — or outright required — to log volunteer hours. College applications ask for them. Internships take them into consideration when reviewing applications and medical schools consider it as a requirement for a future doctor, with average student statistics being “400+” hours.
Over time, volunteering becomes less about helping others and more about proving you are well-rounded, committed and productive. When service is framed this way, motivation shifts so that the goal becomes credential and completion, leaving the core human connection of volunteering out of the scene.
This motivational shift doesn’t just affect the volunteers, but also the broader community. The community is left scarce of genuine care and effort as volunteers only show up for a couple of hours, just to immediately leave at 4 p.m. To pass this time, many even decide to doomscroll instead of actually helping with small tasks like organizing or sanitizing in a medical care setting.
Personally, I have witnessed this at Kaiser Permanente, where a volunteer on a four hour shift sat completely unbothered with their shoes off, legs up on a chair and their thumbs constantly scrolling through social media.
Not only is this inconvenient for the nurses working in the unit, as no additional help is added to their already busy day, but it also becomes a benchmark image for the volunteer organization that allows such behaviors to continue. Although volunteers may pitch in some help from time to time, short-term and disengaged service can give additional strain on organizations that must constantly retrain new volunteers with little long-term payoff.
However, some argue that unwanted volunteering still results in some community engagement, as students are making the time and effort to show up and contribute something to the community. The saying often goes, “Help is help, no matter what.”
And it might be true. It could help the organization, in a sense, with one right assignment completed by a volunteer, even if it means the other five are done wrong. Mistakes are allowed in volunteering since most students are there to learn and not master. But this isn’t how volunteering should be. It shouldn’t be obligatory acts, but rather a shared responsibility that one takes for the community.
Quality of engagement matters because intrinsic motivations for volunteering are what truly shape the quality of their work. Encouraging passion projects to be initiated for impact building is more important and meaningful than volunteering just for resume building.
If volunteering is to regain its meaning, both students and on-campus organizations need to redefine and rethink how it’s valued. Volunteering should focus on self-reflection, where deep engagement is valued by volunteers and students are asked to emphasize the “why” behind participation rather than just hours earned.
This not only helps to see volunteerism as an opportunity to engage with communities, but also develops empathy, accountability and communication, which would naturally add much more to a resume as compared to forced service.
When volunteering becomes just another box to check, everyone loses. Redirecting its purpose begins with recognizing why public service exists in the first place.
