As the holidays approach, community leaders offer advice for engaging kids in volunteering

On a recent Saturday, Amanda O’Rourke attended an event at the National Veterans Art Museum with her 7-year-old daughter, Sienna, where kids created cards for active duty military families in Illinois. It was the mother and daughter’s first service project through The Honeycomb Project, which develops family-friendly service events with partners across Chicago.

“I think it’s important for her to learn to give back,” O’Rourke said, adding that she was impressed with the appeal the event had to kids. She said she plans to attend more Honeycomb events with Sienna.

Searches for service and volunteering opportunities hit a peak each year in November and December during the winter holiday season, community leaders say. But oftentimes, parents can be unsure where to begin, particularly when choosing volunteer projects for their young kids.

The Honeycomb Project, a Chicago-based organization formed in 2011 to fill a need for family-friendly volunteering opportunities, sees an average of 300 to 400 families per month participate in their events. From Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, the organization reports that its number of volunteers nearly doubles, with roughly 1,000 volunteers engaging in more than 26 projects across the city.

Yet, Honeycomb and other Chicago service leaders want to remind volunteers that people and organizations still have needs past the holidays.

The Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly, whose mission is to alleviate isolation and loneliness for older people, sees a lot of interest in December for their program that matches volunteers with a person age 70 or older who lives alone. The program prioritizes friendship, not financial donations, and encourages people to visit twice a month.

“Loneliness doesn’t take a break or a holiday. It ebbs and flows,” said Josh Chartier, director of volunteer services and community engagement.

The matching program serves roughly 1,000 older people, Chartier said. While at least one person must be 18 or older and pass a background screening, he said children can participate in the program with their parents or guardians.

“As kids age and see that older person regularly over the years, they form unique connections on their own,” Chartier said.

Honeycomb co-founder Kristina Lowenstein said the organization — one of the few specifically family-orientated service programs in the country — provides impact stories and media that parents can share with kids in their family before volunteering.

She encourages parents to share similar information with their children for service opportunities when possible so they know how their work is contributing to their community. Efforts like this by parents can offset the potential to contribute to “poverty porn,” or exploiting people’s circumstances for personal gain.

“They can discuss as a family, listen to discussion questions and things like that, so that they walk into those projects, more informed and ready to do the work thoughtfully,” Lowenstein said.

Aidan Chung, 20, still remembers the first family-friendly volunteering project he participated in 12 years ago when he was in elementary school. He volunteered at a food pantry in the Ravenswood neighborhood, helping distribute items and talk with guests that visited the pantry in need of basic food and supplies.

“I remember that I had never done anything like that was so hands-on in terms of helping other people and seeing face-to-face the impact that your actions were having on another human being,” Chung said.

After volunteering at the food pantry, Chung participated in dozens more projects with Honeycomb, where service projects center on helping people of Chicago while teaching kids about the events and community in which they are volunteering.

Chung says the service opportunities he had as a child instilled in him an itch to serve. Now as a sophomore at Northwestern University, he composes music for children through the Children’s Repertory Theater Company.

“A lot of people my age are very focused on what they need to do to succeed and it’s hard to take time outside of that to kind of think about making someone else’s day a little bit better,” Chung said.

Young kids can also be particularly successful for organizing food, clothes and toy drives with the help of adults, said Sister Stephanie Baliga, who oversees distribution of drive collections through Mission of Our Lady of Angels in the Humboldt Park neighborhood.

Through her work in donation distribution, Baliga said she often sees kids grasp the understanding that helping one person makes a difference.

“A lot of times adults forget how important it is to help a singular individual,” she said. “Kids have a reality that a can of soup is going to be someone’s dinner. They have the capacity to better absorb that understanding of giving, which is beautiful to see.”

Since kids need communication with their parents to gather and organize donations, it can also mean a collaborative project for families.

Anyone looking to start a donation drive in a parish, neighborhood or school can contact Baliga to see what items are needed at a given time and then choose what type of drive they want to organize. This fall, nonperishable food and toiletries have been in high demand for drives as the organization’s food pantry needs are large. A portion of donations have also been distributed to the more than 25,000 migrants arriving in Chicago since August 2022.

All of Honeycomb’s programs are local to allow Chicagoland families to help efforts in their own communities, Lowenstein said.

Thinking local is one of the main tips Lowenstein gives to families volunteering through Honeycomb and other organizations. Besides investing in the city and suburbs, local service allows families to better understand issues across Chicagoland and meet volunteers with different perspectives, she said.

Working with a diverse group of volunteers from different backgrounds and income levels can also create a stronger community working together for the benefit of all populations.

“There’s really I think an opportunity to take care of our city at large, rather than just maybe your neighborhood or street or block,” Lowenstein said.

Lowenstein suggests recruiting neighbors to volunteer as a group, creating service habits that extend past December and listening to kids when they bring up problems they see in their neighborhood to know what programs might be most impactful to them.

Lowenstein said Honeycomb’s family programs are designed by educators and promote an experiential approach to service, meaning children learn why the work they are doing matters and why the projects matter to the organizations and people they are serving.

In addition, bringing families to service opportunities can show to children how a community of all age ranges works together and not just as individuals.

“We think that modeling … for a 7-year-old working alongside a 16-year-old or 17-year-old and parents and grandparents is so important to understand how as a community, we can really come together and do this work,” Lowenstein said.

The recent National Veterans Art Museum event was an art-based social practice in collaboration with Honeycomb and serves as a connection between families with and without military experience, museum Executive Director Giselle Futrell said.

A veteran herself, Futrell said she remembers receiving cards from strangers when she was stationed in Afghanistan, and the cards written by kids were “always the most heartwarming,” she said.

Honeycomb is hosting a different drive each week through December and will host its third annual Holiday Cheer Challenge from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday at the InterContinental Hotel, 505 Michigan Ave., Chicago. At the Cheer Challenge, groups of any age can partake in small service activities around the city while participating in a scavenger hunt.