As National Honor Society (NHS) students scramble to complete their three group projects before the April deadline, many find roadblocks and confusion with club volunteer opportunities. Park clubs like Letters of Love and Environmental Club often have similar events to NHS group projects, but the club activities don’t count for NHS involvement. NHS members can find this difficult to navigate, and club leaders often struggle with low participation when events don’t benefit students.
According to NHS advisor Lindsey Meyer, club meetings don’t count for NHS hours because students have an obligation to the club outside of volunteering.
“The point of NHS is to make an impact in the community through volunteering, and clubs are a separate entity from volunteer hours,” Meyer said. “If you’re in a club, that’s school involvement. For example, if you’re in Environmental Club, you are committing to Environmental Club as a separate thing. You’d be putting it on a college resume as a separate thing; ‘I’m in Environmental Club and NHS.’ If you were getting hours for the same task for two things, we consider it double dipping.”
Junior Maggie Tight, co-president of the Letters of Love club, said students who come to Letters of Love meetings understand that what they’re doing is bigger than getting volunteer hours.
“(People come) because it’s for such a good cause,” Tight said. “It’s a lot of fun and what you’re doing is making a big impact in a lot of kids’ lives that are less fortunate than you. All of our members understand that what we’re doing has an impact, even if it’s small.”
According to senior Abigail Oppegaard, founder and president of Environmental Club, members of regular meetings are often more focused on the impact of their actions whereas NHS members may be more focused on getting the credit. However, she said any help, no matter the intent, is important.
“For a lot of people, it’s just something fun to do, they’re looking for an activity, and a lot of people do care about the environment,” Oppegaard said. “(NHS groups are) definitely a different crowd of people. People might not be as focused on the environmental part of the project as they are on getting hours, which is still fine because it’s still helping out the environment (and) making an impact.”
According to Meyer, there has been some confusion between similar events hosted by NHS and clubs. She said the important difference is who hosts the event.
“There’s a lot of confusion about whether (an event is) sponsored by NHS or whether it’s sponsored by Letters of Love, but they’ve been a good partner and a lot of students are in both,” Meyer said. “If we host an event, a lot of the members come, but it’s just different because we are hosting it and would host it even if the Letters of Love club didn’t exist.”
According to Tight, meetings where Letters of Love partnered with NHS were much more heavily attended than regular Letters of Love club meetings.
“There was definitely a lot more student involvement (at the NHS event) and we saw people from other grades. Normally we’re just juniors and a few sophomores at our regular meetings,” Tight said. “That was really fun and we definitely made a lot more cards which was great. I think we had around 200 cards and we normally make around 40-ish so that was really great. We definitely made a little bit bigger of an impact in the Letters of Love global community.”
Oppegaard said the Environmental Club is often strategic with how they host their events and sometimes offers outside volunteer opportunities instead of regular club meetings.
“I definitely think (there would be more participation if meetings counted for hours) and sometimes we intentionally set things up so that they’re not club meetings but they’re sponsored by us so that people can get hours from that,” Oppegaard said. “I definitely do think that makes a difference in attendance.”
Meyer said NHS hopes to lessen the confusion by being clear on what does and doesn’t count for hours. She said it’s important for NHS to treat every club and student event equally.
“We have just tried to keep a really consistent message that if the hours are going toward your involvement in another club or activity, it does not count for NHS,” Meyer said. “The same would go for sports. If you have to do fundraising for basketball and you have to do that for your team, it can’t also count as volunteering because you have to do it anyway for your commitment to that sport. (We’re) just trying to be consistent and fair and not (be) valuing certain clubs over other clubs.”
