Students at Benilde-St. Margaret’s are known for their contributions to the Twin Cities area, giving back to the community through volunteering. However, there are conflicting opinions on whether or not students feel their work makes a difference, and many question the impact that volunteering has on their perspective of the world.
BSM staff and administration strongly encourage students to participate in community volunteer work. By maintaining a strong reputation for caring for their students and their impact on the world, BSM staff make it clear that service is an integral part of being a Red Knight. According to the BSM website, “Students at Benilde-St. Margaret’s are encouraged to stretch their knowledge of the world by meeting new people, engaging in activities and projects they might not normally consider, …a mature faith experience involves service, commitment, and intellectual understanding.”
For junior Olivia Brennan, service is a big part of her life. She volunteers at North Memorial Health Hospital in Maple Grove, helping with the nursing staff. She explains the personal importance to her of volunteering at a health facility. “Especially for healthcare workers at hospitals, seeing all that they have to do to help all the people that are in their hospital makes you a lot more grateful for them,” Brennan said.
Volunteering is proven to have physical and mental health benefits as well, especially for younger generations. Volunteering provides opportunities for students to diversify their perspective by helping out in settings where they may not typically spend time. “Volunteering just makes me feel like I’m giving back to the community,” Brennan said.
Peg Hodapp is a Theology teacher at BSM and the leader of the Red Knights Volunteer Corporation (RKVC), dedicating much of her life to service. She explained the transformation in students that she has noticed in her time leading RKVC at BSM. “I think it can be such an eye-opening, world-view changing thing for a person, they don’t even necessarily realize it,” Hodapp said.
At BSM, there is a required theology course [Discipleship] where the main focus is service. Students are required to volunteer for at least 25 hours by the end of the semester. This volunteering requirement brings a lot of new environments to the eyes of students, especially when they may not have been fully aware of the situations that others are in before. Working closely with a specific agency multiple times can influence students to become passionate about the change they are making. “There are students who have made decisions about what they want to do with their lives based on having done service,” Hodapp said.
Hodapp explained how at her last school, there was a requirement of 60 service hours. She noticed that a lot of students were not content with this requirement. However, she noticed a shift after they began their work and said that students’ perspectives of the work they were doing made a noticeable change. “People would grumble, you know, ‘why do I have to do this?’ But then they would be the ones who would come back and say, You know what? This is something that really grounded me,” Hodapp said.