“Use what you have. Do what you can.”
The Lee Honors College promotes community engagement though volunteer service as part of our effort to provide honors students with real-world experience, help them apply their classroom learning to practical scenarios that have real implications, and encourage them to practice important habits like leadership, problem-solving, and time-management. There is also the trust engendered by giving back to the community, which teaches students to repay to the community some portion of what they have received from it; after all, as the proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” suggests, we are who we are because of the support we received from others, including our own local communities.
LHC requires students to perform a minimum of 20 hours of volunteer service per academic year and recognizes that volunteering is a two-way street: It can benefit the individual as much as the cause he/she chooses to advance. Aside from putting our talents to work, learning new skills, meeting people, connecting with our community and much more, when helping others, we are also learning in big or small ways. This was well understood by the late and endearing emeritus professor James (Jim) Bosco (1939-2021). Dr. Bosco relished helping honors students not only because he believed wholeheartedly in the power of education, but also because he was a student for life. He once mentioned to me regarding thesis projects he had mentored in the past, “I learned from them as much as the students did.”
Dr. Bosco was game when it came to assisting honors students: he never hesitated to give his time and talents in service of others, and we at the Lee Honors College benefited greatly from this generosity. Often he volunteered before he was asked to, as when I last communicated with him in reference to mentoring a new honors thesis. He had found out we needed a mentor for this purpose and emailed me on January 12 to offer his assistance. With his usual sense of humor and warmth he said, "Hi Irma: I understand you are looking for emeriti faculty to volunteer for honors theses. If you run out of people on your ‘A’ list I am happy to help. I have had quite positive experiences with the LHC theses I have mentored.” These last words of his stuck in my mind, as they underline the joy that comes from learning and from contributing to a cause that one cares about. He also never presented his service as a charity: he saw volunteering as an exchange, not something one does for people who are not as fortunate as the mentors are or intellectually at the same level. With this attitude, Dr. Bosco upheld the worthiness of those with whom he volunteered.
We can make a difference in somebody else’s life by volunteering for something we find worth supporting, and there are so many ways of doing that in our everyday lives. As Dr. Bosco showed, there is profound satisfaction in assisting others, and as the great American tennis player Arthur Ashe said in reference to this subject, it doesn’t have to be a huge enterprise. "Start where you are,” Ashe said. “Use what you have. Do what you can.”