When many people think of community service, they think of kids being forced to volunteer at the local homeless shelter or nursing home to get credit for a class or convicts picking up trash on the side of the highway. Even in the best circumstances, most consider service as a kind of charitable act to be done every once in a while, like donating old clothes to the Salvation Army or making a monthly donation to a favorite charity.

In a paper released by Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement entitled “Civic Pathways Out of Poverty and Into Opportunity” a new perspective on service is proposed. It asks that we view service as an opportunity to not only help the community, but to improve our own circumstances. Taking inspiration from programs like the Civil Conservation Corps of the 1930s, the Peace Corps, and AmeriCorps programs, PACE suggests that we create service opportunities that have incentives for those providing it. As the title of the paper suggests, the idea is that service can be road out of poverty for those who may not otherwise be able to attend college.

A disproportional number of minority children are living in poverty and dropping out of high school and, for impoverished people and minorities to help themselves, higher education is vital. Many of these people, because of their circumstances, do not have access to the opportunities for higher education. Service and civic activities can and should be pathways to education and meaningful employment. National corps service programs would be an effective way to help disenfranchised youth gain job skills and a pathway to higher education.

In order for these kinds of programs to come to fruition, PACE suggests that certain changes must occur: we must reframe our perspective of service, decrease the barriers to opportunity for young people, prioritize diversity in leadership, set youth on a pathway early in life, increase incentives for service, and work toward realistic workforce development. The goal of creating these service programs is for young people to have alternative routes to finding meaningful jobs, create positive change in their communities, and increase success in college or other higher education.

Through youth organizing, civic engagement and service, we can help create new opportunities for young people to go to college and find meaningful employment. Civic institutions can do their part by systematically connecting existing public and institutions into a civic pathway network, promote the impact of service, and scale up existing organizations like AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps.

Service can be more than an isolated act charitable act. It can be a strategically planned method for creating jobs and opportunities to create pathways out of poverty.