Anatomy of a Good Day

On Saturday, I went with my friend Rebecca (see her comment, below) and our seven-year olds, Esme and Rafael, to the Red Hook Community Farm, a project in Red Hook, Brooklyn run by the great organization Added Value, that had been totally inundated by the rising sea water in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.  We spent about three hours at the farm, breaking apart heads of garlic for planting and turning over the soil to see what could be recovered.  It was a good day.  The kids -- surrounded by other kids as well as grown-ups of all ages -- worked hard and remarkably consistently, with a bit of time off for dancing, running, pitching clods of earth, talking.  The adults were fully engaged as well (as my back reminded me Sunday morning).  The alarm bells on the kids went off at about 1:30 and we handed over our shovels to the next crew, had a bit of lunch in the mellow autumn air, and moved on.

I don't write about this here in the spirit of self-congratulation, but for the sake of analysis: what made this experience of volunteering with children work?  How can that help us figure out how to find or create more of these kinds of activities.  Here are my conclusions:

• The right fit between the host and volunteering children:  In addition to running a working farm, providing youth leadership opportunities in Red Hook (and producing great vegetables!), Added Value works with New York City schools, including the Brooklyn New School, the public school Esme and Rafael attend, to provide farm-based learning.   So, they knew what kids could do, welcomed them, gave them tasks that were age-appropriate but still -- very important -- useful and valuable to the farm.  In this instance, the kids were not doing anything different from what the adults were doing, and everyone was contributing, and that made it feel like community.  
• Well-organized (by somebody else):  This volunteering event was organized by the wonderful PTA at the Brooklyn New School.  On Friday, we received an email from the school and made a plan to show up.  Easy.  As I said in an earlier post, one of the challenges to fitting volunteering with our kids into our hectic lives is that it usually takes work and time just to find a place to go that allows (and values the contributions of) kids.  All of us doing this individually is incredibly inefficient and usually means that it doesn't happen.  I know, why doesn't somebody start a project to help take on that coordinating role, to make it easier? Funny, you should ask....
• The kids understood what they were doing: There are a lot of levels on which we could have explained the significance of our work that day, but the simplest one worked fine for seven-year olds: the farm was flooded, we needed to help them repair the damage.  That's even easier to explain than hunger, somehow, and still entirely accurate.  In some cases, kids may not completely understand exactly the whys and wherefores of what they're doing and that may not matter that much, in terms of what they get out of it: kids practice a lot of things before they really understand what they're doing, and the practice is key to future understanding.  Still, I think this project worked well for us because the tasks and the goals were clear.  In a future post, I want to take on the challenge of conducting political advocacy with younger kids, which is trickier (and I would love some guidance there).

Have you had particularly good experiences volunteering with your (or someone else's) kids?  What made it work?  Also interested in the epic failures - any light to shed on those?  Last week I dragged my kid back and forth through Red Hook carrying cleaning supplies and following up on leads from folks who had called in requesting help.  She's a sturdy kid and didn't melt down, but let it be known that this was not working for her.  I think it's like what they say about a lot of things "garbage in, garbage out" (no Sandy-related pun intended): I didn't know exactly what we were doing and how we were going to help and, as a result not sure how much we did, or what I communicated to her about the value of our morning.