Getting Involved: How to Find Volunteer Opportunities and Make a Difference with PVSA

In this episode of the Sage Studio Podcast, Tiffiny Webster is joined by Regional Mentor, Taylore Coulombe, to discuss the Presidential Volunteer Service Award (PVSA) program and Sage Serves. The PVSA program was established in 2003 by the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation as a way to recognize the role of volunteers and their impact on communities. Sage Oak, being a certifying organization, offers this program to its students, starting from kindergarten to 12th grade.

Participating in the PVSA program provides students with the opportunity to demonstrate character, accountability, excellence, growth mindset, and service, which are the student learning outcomes (SLOs) valued by Sage Oak. It not only helps students learn the values of giving back and service but it can also help high school students when completing college applications. Colleges often value a history of community service, and having the PVSA on college applications can make students stand out from the crowd. 

There are no set volunteer hour requirements and all students are welcome to participate. Students who are able and willing to serve in an extensive way can work towards earning awards for reaching service hour milestones. All participants will be recognized at the End of the Year Regional Socials and at High School Graduation.


Parents and families are encouraged to look for volunteer opportunities within their local communities. 

Thank you for listening to the Sage Studio podcast presented by Sage Oak Charter Schools and hosted by Tiffiny Webster, M.A.Ed. We invite you to follow the show and leave your review below. Sage Oak Charter Schools is an independent study nonclassroom based TK-12 personalized learning public charter school serving students in Southern California. Visit sageoak.education for more information.

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Transcript

0:14

Welcome to another episode of the Sage Studio. I'm Tiffiny Webster and today I'm joined once again by the lovely Taylore Coulombe. Taylore, welcome back. Thank you. Good to be here. So great to have you here. For those of you that might not know Taylore, she is a Regional Mentor here at Sage Oak and she always has some great programs that she's a part of great events that she's helping to organize here at Sage Oak. And that is exactly why she is here today. She's going to be talking to us all about Sage Serves and the PVSA program. I'm so excited to get into this with you today, Taylore. So thank you so much for being here. You're welcome. All right. So tell our families that might be new to Sage Oak or unfamiliar with this program, What is the PVSA program? And let's just start with what does PVSA even stand for? Yeah, great question. Okay, so the PVSA stands for President's Volunteer Service Award. And this was actually established in 2003 by the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation. And it was just a way for our country to recognize the role of volunteers and the impact we make in our communities and just to really place value and emphasis on how we can impact our world. And it's part of our nation's identity and our strength. So they wanted to honor those people. I love that idea. So there is this idea about really reinforcing those values of being part of a community, giving back through service. And how did that go from like a nationwide idea to something that we've adopted here at Sage Oak? Yeah, so Sage Oak was able to become a certifying organization a few years back. I think for the past past six or so years we've been a certifying organization. Different organizations can do that and it's really special that we're able to offer this to our students because it also looks really good on college applications for our high schoolers specifically. So even if we start preparing our younger students with this mindset and helping them develop this idea of service being a value in their life, even from a young age on into adulthood. It helps them in college applications, but also we really care about our students. We want them to be thriving citizens in our communities once they graduate and move on from Sage Oak. So we're just really proud that we can offer this program to our families. And we just hope that families will be excited about it and want to participate with us this year. It's such a great program for that reason that, like you said, it has those benefits. Not only does it benefit, you know, the community and the organizations where students are providing their service, but then it also does benefit the students as well, because they are growing their character. And they're also earning those recognitions as well, which is only going to help propel them into the next stage of life when they start applying for applications. These are the types of things that really help students stand out in the crowd. And I will say, having worked in the high school department, I know that, you know, when colleges are looking at service, any service is always recognized, but when they can see a history of students performing service for their community. That really does go a long way versus like trying to squeak in just that one hour of service the last year of high school. It really speaks to the student and the character of the student when they have a little bit of this longevity behind the service that they are providing. In that way, it's so great that Sage Oak offers this to to so many students. I mean, what grade levels of students can participate? How soon can our family start with this program? So thank you. Students who are as young as five years old can start. So anywhere from five years with this program goes even to even into adulthood once kids have graduated. But for our purposes, kindergarten through 12th grade is what we say. And so like you're saying, yes, having this on a college application, having any service hours is really, really important. But also when you kind of have this stamp of approval from this overseeing organization, a President's Service Award, Volunteer Award. It's just an extra special thing that colleges would really value when they were, if they were to see that. So we touched a little bit on the importance of this program because it helps students learn the values of giving back, learn the values of service within their communities. And I know that that relates to our Sage Oak student learning outcomes. Can you talk to us a little bit about how those things correlate? Yeah, so here at Sage Oak we do have something called our SLOs which are student learning outcomes. There's four of them in the areas of excellence, growth, mindset, accountability, and service. And these are just things that here at Sage Oak, we really value and think are important. And even all the way from our kids coming into kindergarten. All the way up till 12th grade students. These are things we want to be talking about with them, preparing them for, encouraging them in. And so I really feel like PVSA kind of touches on all four of those things and can foster developing accountability, excellence, growth mindset and service by being a part of this program. So it's really nice that this pairs so nicely with our SLOs and that's very exciting. I think that is a really nice fit as well. And when parents and families are thinking about, you know, how they can work on those core areas, the excellence, the growth mindset, the accountability and the service this program really does allow them to do all of those things at one time. So give us a couple ideas. If this is starting to sound good to some of our parents, and they're starting to think about ways that their kids might be able to start volunteering give us some ideas about ways that That you've seen students do this. Yeah. So there are just so many things that kids can jump and jump into and be a part of, but some examples would be volunteering locally at your local library, maybe through reading programs or shelving books. You could be a part of a community garden, work You could volunteer at an elderly home, participate in food drives, animal shelters, park and beach cleanup, charity walks and runs, making care packages for military, homeless shelters, disaster reliefs. You could be a part of a community art project, festivals, or you could even host or participate in fundraisers. I mean, the sky's the limit. There's so many ways that you could jump in here. One thing I would suggest, too, is you could contact your local city and find out. Ask them what are some volunteer opportunities that they have coming up that you could jump into your kids could jump into see if there's any nonprofit organizations are already working with. You could also pair come alongside and then also think about to what are your kids already a part of. So if they're Really into soccer and they're part of it. You know, a local soccer community where ways that they could give back to that organization that they're already a part of whether that's volunteering at the snack shop, or if they're an opportunity where they could ref and volunteer in that way. So we, we want to make this obviously as such a great fit for your family. So we would really encourage families to kind of naturally think about what are some things you're already a part of that you could just kind of continue and build upon. I think those are such great ideas. And I think they're so doable because all of those types of organizations are looking for volunteers. And the other thing that I think is really great about some of the ideas that you gave is it sounds like there is room for siblings. of different ages to also volunteer together, right? You could have an opportunity where you have, you know, your, your kids going together to a community garden, working on different things, or helping out on the soccer field, as you mentioned, in different ways, or going to the library and helping out in other ways. Older students might be In a place where they can do some tutoring or reading to others where maybe younger kids are you know, organizing books or putting things back like you mentioned. So really good ideas that sound really doable. Okay. So for our families that want to get involved in this, how does that whole process go? Yeah. So we, in the last few weeks, we've put it in our Sage News that there's a survey that you can fill out that says you want to volunteer. It's in our Sage News. You could also find it on our website, or if you can't find it in either of those places, feel free to contact your Sage Oak teacher and your teacher will be happy to provide that. information to you, but students fill out a form, a survey that alerts our team, our SageServe team, that they want to be a participant. And then from there, once we get that form back from you, we will send your student a welcome email. And in that welcome email, we will include Two main things. One is going to be a form that you would print off and take to these overseeing organizations that you're working with for them to sign off on your students, hours that they're where they're serving. So there's, you want to make sure you find that form. And then there's also going to be another survey where you log your hours. So your students will go in, or you, the parents can do it for the student. Go in, you're going to type in, you know, some things like your name, where you were volunteering the amount of hours, and then you're going to also upload. Other form where you got all the signatures, you're going to upload that as well. So we can kind of see proof that those hours took place. And then from there, we will then input all those hours and track them all year, log them for you, give you a, you'll be able to see your running total all year long. So you can kind of see where you're at. And we'll at the end of the year, total those hours up and determine if students are going to be able to get. There's also a participation award, or there's also three other awards you could do bronze, silver or gold, and that's all going to be based upon the amount of hours that a student serves. So there really isn't a minimum requirement. If you even do, you know, a half an hour, we would count that as you're a participant with us. But there's different age groups. So our first age group is 5 to 10. And then for in our school, we would have our oldest age group, which is young adults 16 to 25. And a five to 10 year old would only have to do 26 hours to earn bronze, or they could go all the way up to 75 hours to earn gold were like a high school student. would have to earn at least 100 hours to earn bronze, but they would have to earn at least 250 hours to earn gold. So it's broken up by age group, which is kind of nice, makes it doable for our younger kiddos, and then it really challenges our, our older students. That was so much great information there and I love the way that Sage Serve has got this all organized for parents. Okay. Just to recap that just a little bit. Parents can look for the Sage Serve Survey, and when they fill out that survey or fill out that form, that is going to put them in contact with your committee. And the forms that they need so that they can begin to collect these hours, log their hours, get the signatures that they need, and then they can upload that to you. And then you'll be tracking all those hours so that at the end of this, students can get recognized for their participation. And then even their achievement levels, if they're hitting certain milestones, they're going to be recognized with some awards at the end of the year. So cool that that is in place for our. Our kids. How did our students do last year? Did you have a lot of participation in this program last We had over 30 students earn either bronze. silver or gold, and we had 16 students earn gold, which is pretty great. We're really hoping to increase our participation this year. So that's why we're really hoping so many families will choose to jump in here with us. But we did have over 4, 000 hours collectively of volunteer. Volunteer hours, which is really exciting. And that is very impressive. That is a lot of volunteer service hours for sure. So something really, really great to see that so many of our Sage Oak students are getting out there and taking the time to just, as you said, even like a half an hour a week, an hour a week, all of that not only benefits the communities that our students are part of, but also counts towards this program, which is so awesome. So doable. I love that. Okay. With that, we mentioned that our Sage Oak families, they can go on to the website. I will include the direct link to the PVSA section of our website in the show notes so that you can get right there to the information that you need if that's something that you want to be a part of. I'm also going to list out some of those ideas that you gave Taylore of ways that our families can think about how they want to volunteer so that they can start participating in this program. One more question I meant to ask you was, is this program something that students can join at any time, or is there a small window, or how much time do they have to participate in that program? We didn't talk about dates too much. Can you, can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah, that's a great question. So the program actually runs from May 1st to April 30th. So this year we've already been going since May but no one's behind because you can give us your hours at any point. You could even sign up technically on April 29th and then still get all your hours in there as long as you have those signatures to prove that those hours really took place. So we You welcome students to enroll all year long, but just know that it goes from May 1st to April 30th. And so that is when the cutoff day is where we will be totaling all the hours on April 30th. And I also wanted to mention too, it's really exciting because at our end of the year socials, we actually honor all of our students that participated in this program. So it's really a fun way. Just at the end of the year to celebrate these students and their accomplishments. I just wanted to make sure that we mentioned that, too. So good. I love that part, too. And it really is so fun to not only see the students being recognized for all the effort that they put into this, but it's so great to hear the stories, too, of the impact that they are making. I mean, I know that we've had so many of our students be able to make connections, make new friends. even, have some college and career opportunities come out of some of the volunteering that they did. You know, they may have discovered that, wow, they really love working with animals or they really love working with the elderly, or they really want to get involved in civic government at some point. So that's another win too. I mean, that they really just get a chance to see where they fit into the world through the means of. of service. So really cool to see. Great point. That's a great point. Well, thank you so much, Taylore, for all that you are doing to bring this program to Sage Oak I know that our families are going to really benefit from it. It's going to definitely impact our students and allow them to make an impact in their community. So such a great program. So many wins. Again, we'll add all the information to the show notes that you can be part of the PVSA program if that is something That that's really speaking to you. So we hope that it is. And again, Taylore, best of luck with this program. I can't wait to hear about what our Sage Oak students do this year. I have a feeling they're going to over deliver it. They tend to. Absolutely. A pleasure to be here today. Thanks for having me. All right. All right, again, visit our show notes, grab the link if you want to know more about how to get involved in the Sage Oak PVSA program. All right. Thanks, Taylore. See you on the next one. Okay. Bye bye.