By: Alexis LeMieux

With summer coming up, many will be left with free time. What better way to fill that gap than with some volunteer time?

There’s a lot of different ways one can volunteer. Whether it be within your own school, or going out into the community to get some time in.

“There’s a lot of things in our school that can help you serve a lot,” junior Laney Bottemiller said.

Benefits for volunteering can go two ways.

“With volunteering, you can help your school, your community, and those around you,” Bellbrook High School teacher Tess Rivero said. “Being able to get out of your social circle is really important, and volunteering is something that will help you.”

In addition to aiding in the community, volunteering can give some personal benefits, as well.

“You can have much more confidence, maturity, and abilities to navigate difficult situations,” Rivero said.

“For me personally, volunteering gave me a greater sense of purpose,” Bottemiller said. “Just doing service boosts you as a person.”

There are plenty of local volunteer opportunities that one can do.

Bottemiller, who is in National Honors Society, Supportive Peers, and Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps, shared her tips.

“For supportive peers and peer tutoring, I do service every single day for them,” Bottemiller said. “I get an hour and a half of service just being at school because of them. With JROTC, we do stuff almost every single weekend, if not more. The same goes for NHS, we do a lot of different stuff.”

Rivero leads NHS, Supportive Peers, and Peer Tutoring all at once. They are prominent in the community when it comes to their different services.

“We have peer tutoring in school,” Rivero said. “We have supportive peers, where the students go out to the different buildings and help out there. We [NHS] will help out at the Sugar Festival and any Park District events.”

With summer coming up, those options for volunteering will not be available for the time being. There are plenty of other volunteer opportunities in the community.

“You can volunteer at libraries, like the public library in town, or the Dayton Metro Library,” Rivero said. “There’s churches that do outreach, like Habitat for Humanity. There’s soup kitchens arounds, and all kinds of things.”

“There’s stuff in your community, you just honestly have to search for it. It’s not going to come to you,” Bottemiller said.

When it comes to helping out in the community, everybody should get out there and get involved.

“I would say just don’t be afraid,” Rivero said. “Grab a friend and just go do something. Don’t hesitate, just go do it, because you will really grow from it. I know sometimes people are scared, or timid, but I mean it. I think as in my years of teaching, I think kids have learned the most from doing things like that. Not from a traditional school with academic kinds of things. They learn by going out and helping other people. That’s how you grow as a person.”

“Make it a priority, not a second thought,” Bottemiller said. “I used to be like, oh, well, I can start volunteering once I get my homework done, once I do all this stuff. But, it should be as much of a priority, if not more than anything else.”