Back in freshman year, I found myself wondering whether it should really be called “volunteering” if students only do it because they have to.

I started volunteering at Weyrich Health Center, helping elderly patients with daily tasks. The more I did these tasks, the more disconnected I felt from the seniors.            Though I felt bad for them, I did not want to communicate with them.

Then one rainy day, I met Colonel Hemsworth. He invited me to his table and asked for some company. I regarded this as another boring task. However, listening to his stories, I learned that he was a brilliant war veteran(老兵), and I found his tales interesting.

After my brief talk with the Colonel, I realized that I shared common characters with all the seniors. I felt like an oxygen molecule(分子)—ready to form a relationship—rather than an isolated(孤立的) gas.

I met with many learned senior citizens who shared their experiences and wisdom. No longer did I walk aimlessly down the hallways. I found myself enjoying talking with these people as I learned their histories. Why hadn’t I realized sooner that volunteer work could enlighten me?

Some argue that volunteering and working for change does not help. However, they fail to realize that the world is constantly changing and humans must adapt. My experience at Weyrich Health Center has taught me that refusing to change one’s views and accept new ones leads to short-term goals that finally disappear. Communication with others is an important part of life. Volunteering is not just a requirement or a way to improve your resume, it is a time for service and personal growth.

Now I enjoy volunteering my time surrounded by seniors who bring history alive for me. By communicating with them, I have developed into a more dynamic person.

It is irrefutable: Parents, who talk to, read and engage with their very young children as often as possible, help them build literacy (读写能力) skills at an early age.

Also certain: Parents of very young children usually have to do a lot of laundry. And low-income families tend to bring their kids with them to public laundromats (洗衣房).

Those truths appear once a week at select neighborhood laundromats in Chicago. That’s when librarians lay down colorful mats and oversized board books beside the industrial washing machines.

Inside one of about 14 laundromats in the city’s low-income neighborhoods, the librarians gather all available children for Laundromats Story Time (LST), a Chicago Public Library (CPL) program.

With the noise of the washers and dryers, anywhere between a handful to more than a dozen children hear stories, sing songs and play games designed to help their brains develop. The event also aims to instruct parents on how to repeat the experience for their kids, working to raise poor literacy rates in underserved communities.

"We read books, we sing songs, we do plays," says Becca Ruidl, the CPL’s STEAM Team early learning manager, who runs the LST program. "We kind of keep it going so parents can walk in adn join in at any time. But a big part of what we do is model literacy skills for parents so they can do it at home with their kids."

While a laundromat seems an unlikely place to engage with children, "we really wanted to meet people in the community where they’re. "Ruidl says.

And it clearly meets a need: Library officials say the program is in increasing demand, while Ruidl says families have adjusted their household’s laundry day to suit the librarians’ laundromat visits. At the same time, LST’s co-sponsors—including a laundry industry trade group and Libraries Without Borders, an organization fighting poverty through literacy—have worked with the CPL to draft an instruction handbook to help expand the concept to other U.S. cities.

You may not have heard of Ashoka, but for the past 27 years, this association, founded by Bill Drayton, has fought poverty (贫穷)and sickness, promoted education and encouraged small businesses. To support these worthy causes, Ashoka provides money for the world’s most promising "changemakers" seeking to solve urgent problems and would like to create a world in which every citizen is a changemaker.

Drayton believes that anyone can become an agent for change. The important thing is to simply give yourself permission. If you see a problem that you care about, you can help solve it. The young in particular are willing to accept this concept because at heart every child wants to grow into a happy, healthy, contributing adult. In fact, it is many young people’s ambition to set up programmes or businesses that improve social conditions. An excellent example is an Ashoka project started in 1995 in Dhaka, which handled the rubbish problem facing the city, helped local farmers and provided an income for poor people there .

When Masqsood and Iftekhar began to study the problem of all the uncollected rubbish that lay in Dhaka’s streets, attracting rats and disease, they discovered that 80% of it was natural waste. So they educated the poor people in the city to compost (把……制成堆肥)this waste. They knew that they would have a market for the end product because local farmers were struggling with chemical fertilisers (化肥) which were expensive and had reduced the natural minerals in the soil over the years. At first, they were refused, but once they were able to persuade them that there was money to be made , the project took off. In 2009 sales were $14,000.

Drayton is optimistic that in ten years Ashoka will be making really serious, practical progress in bringing about social change by changing the way we look at economic development.