Community service can include simple things such as reaching out to the elderly.
Community service projects offer people an opportunity to give something back to their communities. Through community service, groups and individuals can take part in projects to benefit the community as a whole and minister to individual needs as well. Examples of community service projects include environmental clean-ups, outreach to needy families and lending a helping hand to those with special needs.
Environmental Projects
There are some community projects targeted at getting groups and individuals involved in conservation and clean-up projects for environment. Adopt Your Watershed, an Environmental Protection Agency online database, lists more than 2,600 groups that are involved in protecting and restoring the planet's most precious resource, water. The Adopt Your Watershed website helps visitors learn how they can get involved in activities that include stream clean-up, water monitoring and storm drain marking. In addition to a list of groups involved in water conservation projects, the Adopt Your Watershed website provides a list of activities for individuals to perform to further water conservation.
In addition to water conservation environmental community projects, there are projects such as Adopt a Highway that encourage groups and individuals to pick up trash strewn along the roadways in the community.
Helping Those With Special Needs
Special needs-based community service projects can make a difference in the life of someone who suffers from a disability. This type of community service can be performed by student groups, adult organizations or individuals who want to make a difference in a handicapped individual's life. A few examples of community service projects for those with special needs include setting up a buddy system for special needs children at school; volunteering at an agency that works with handicapped children; taking toys to the children's cancer ward at a hospital; building a wheelchair accessible ramp to help a wheelchair-bound individual access his home more easily, or devoting volunteer time to a rehabilitation center.
Government-Based Projects
AmeriCorps is a government-initiated program that provides adults with numerous opportunities to serve within their community through partnerships with nonprofit organizations at the local and the national levels. Some of the opportunities available through AmeriCorps include tutoring and mentoring disadvantaged youth, affordable house building, literacy programs, park and stream clean-up and disaster response.
Family Community Service
A family-based community service project can be an excellent way for parents to instill within their children awareness of meeting needs within the community. Some community service projects that families can get involved in may include visiting a nursing home, volunteer work at homeless shelter or soup kitchen, yard work for the elderly in the community or volunteering to work at a Special Olympics event.
