Project Ideas
Types of Service
Browse through a list of service learning topics and choose the type of service learning activity that is right for your students: direct, indirect, or action.
Direct
Students interact directly with those they serve
- Tutor younger students in a subject you excel in
- Coach physically disabled students in a team sport
- Assist second-language speakers in enrolling their children in school
- Tutor non-English speaking students in English
- Participate in a local Habitat for Humanity home construction project
- Befriend a student struggling with mental illness
- Spend time with the elderly at a nursing home by visiting and listening to their stories
- Clean-up a local river, stream or lake
- Sing and play games with children suffering from HIV/AIDS
- Help to prepare and serve food in a soup kitchen or homeless shelter
- Plant a community garden with community members
Indirect
Students perform a service without firsthand contact with the recipients.
- Organize a Read-a-Thon in your school or neighborhood.
- Offer your clerical skills to a local Special Olympics office.
- Create fliers to announce that there are volunteers to assist non-native English speaking parents enroll their children in school.
- Research and fundraise for ESL books and supplies for ESL students' use.
- Organize a donated materials drive to assist a local Habitat for Humanity or housing project.
- Organize a Mental Illness Awareness Week in your school—invite outreach coordinators and medical professionals to present and role-play particular topics.
- Organize an Intergenerational activity day in a local nursing home for fellow students.
- Increase local environmental awareness and support by writing a newspaper article about the local river, stream or lake clean up.
- Create and perform a puppet show for children suffering from HIV/AIDS.
- Contact local restaurants and bakeries and arrange for them to donate their leftover and day-old bread to the local homeless shelter.
- Ask local nurseries to sponsor the community garden project by donating plants, seeds, or potting soil to the venture
- Help a Peace Corps Volunteer fund a project through the Peace Corps Partnership Program.
Action
Students take civic action by educating the public about particular issues in order to change or eliminate misunderstandings about culture/differences. They can take action by researching an issue, becoming an expert, or staking out a position.
- Join an online discussion about the topic
- Organize a letter or e-mail campaign for the particular topic
- Organize an awareness raising assembly in your local school or community center
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