There are many reasons why, as a parent or guardian, you might have considered the benefits of your teen enrolling on a high school service program, like ours here at The Road Less Traveled (RLT).

Participation in some form of community, environmental, and/or animal service might seem like an attractive thing for your 6th to 12th grader to have on their resume. Or perhaps your child has school service hour requirements, or they need service for college applications? Or maybe, they just love service and want to give back to the world (we love this reason the most!)

Other common reasons for being drawn towards service-oriented trips include the role that they can play in improving young participants’ global awareness, independence, sense of privilege, and social skills.

You get the idea; teen service programs can be a valuable part of adolescence and a great routine to start getting involved in from a young age.

We take pride in supporting service work that makes a real difference

However, let’s focus for a moment on the “service itself”. Ask any member of our team at RLT, and they will tell you that service work as part of a student travel program should never be seen merely as something that “looks good”, or exclusively as an aid for getting a young person into their desired college (although such “extra” benefits can, of course, often be welcome).

One of our guiding principles, for example, is that we only ever undertake service work in locations around the world where it is wanted.

So, if your teen accompanies us on a service tour to Colorado, Cambodia, Spain, Hawaii, Kenya, or any of the other territories our programs visit, they can be sure that they will be helping with projects that contribute positively to the given locality. We work with our local partners, and they share the challenges being faced, the needs within their community, and how we can help. We then work alongside them to work on these projects.

The exact requirements of a particular community can naturally vary over time. So, we tailor our teen service programs each year to whatever the local needs may currently be. This, in turn, helps to give the young participants on our trips a variety of skills and experiences, even if they have traveled with us on programs in past years.

Another component of our student service trips, is that the projects that we help with are ongoing throughout the year, and often over multiple years. We want students to understand the context of the work that they are doing, and we are selective with our partners to ensure our students' efforts are a genuinely positive contribution into a larger strategic effort by the community, organization or charity.

Your child won’t just be helping their destination community – they will also be learning about themselves

We see year after year how impactful service not only helps communities in need, but also how it plays a significant role in the participants personal growth.

Sure enough, whether your child spends their next summer helping to restore a threatened habitat, monitor and feed animals, or run kids’ camps – to mention just a few of the possibilities – they can be assured that they will learn so much more about the wider world, and their place within that world.

Joining an RLT high school service program can help nurture students into becoming responsible global citizens. All the while, your child will gain a sensitivity for – and appreciation of – societies and cultures that might be very different to their own.

To learn more about our meaningful service trips for teens, schedule a call with an RLT director today.

Our service work is meaningful, not just tokenistic!