One thing that's really cool about BYU is they have the YServe. There's so many service opportunities you can do there. I'm going to one where we just make like scarves out of trash bags, I think. But there's just so many opportunities and ways to get involved in the community and help give back to the community.
One of my favorite things at BYU was I was connected through a local school through YServe and I was able to go and help just any of the different classes that needed my help. Like any amount of time that you have they will work with you because they just need volunteers. I got super close with the teacher. I got super close with the kids. It is a great opportunity to be able to just serve like these amazing kids who might just need like a little extra help when it comes to school. So definitely check out YServe because they have so many different opportunities that you are bound to find something that works for you and your schedule.
If I'm not mistaken, I'm sure that every stake has someone who's in charge of, or ward, sorry, but I think they're in charge of service or like JustServe. I know JustServe is a great opportunity to do service, but there should be someone in your ward or stake that has a calling who's in charge of service. So I think just reaching out to them and asking what you can do to help around the community would be a great way to get some service opportunities while you are here at Brigham Young University.
I know a lot of people before me have mentioned the just the YSERV office, but I'd say there's this big event that actually just happened yesterday for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It was a community outreach day and it was a bunch of clubs in the Wilkinson Student Center and it was just this big event where you could go to any number of different service groups and clubs and you could just do a little bit of service for each one and it lasted for about I think two hours maybe two and a half for the different service opportunities after they had a devotional at the beginning and you could just do any number of things like making a we love you card or an interactive activity for kids or family history or any number of things so definitely next year I would check that out. It was a great day to spend my day off.
A service opportunity that I feel like is often overlooked is also just the people around you, like especially living in an apartment, living with potentially people you've never lived with before, like just being aware of their needs and like serving the people that you live with and the people that live near you is also like a great way to not only like make their lives better but also make your life better and it can also like really help with stress and like feeling overwhelmed to just like really small things. It doesn't have to be anything crazy like holding the door open for someone, you know, or like making extra dinner and like giving some to your roommates, like those small things are also totally count as service.
While attending BYU, you can find service to opportunities around every corner. You're right near a hospital there that always welcomes volunteers and people to help out. You also have tons of public schools around that always welcome people to help kids with reading and basic writing skills, etc. So, if you have a desire to serve, you have plenty of opportunity at BYU to find service. All you have to do is decide to serve, decide how you want to serve, and start looking because there's plenty of opportunities.
BYU has such an awesome program called Y-Serve. The office is in the Wilkinson Center and through Y-Serve there are so many different projects that you can sign up for depending on your interests and you worked directly with them and they help you find great opportunities to serve. So Y-Serve is a great place if you're looking for more volunteer and service opportunities.
Okay, so there's an organization called YSERV and you can go and volunteer and do service projects.
One of my favorite service opportunities that I've taken part of here at BYU is Provo Youth Mentoring. It's not happening currently, but my freshman year it was, and I'm sure it'll resume post-COVID. But you basically are assigned a student from a local middle school and you just do different activities with them as a group, and it was really awesome. I loved the kid that I was assigned to. He's so cute, and just being able to get to know him and see how he's doing in his classes and show him BYU and help him get excited about college was a great experience and one that I will remember forever.
If you're an animal lover, you can go to the local animal shelter and just walk the dogs or just hang out with some of the animals.
One of my favorite YSERV opportunities I've participated in is Adopt-a-Grandparent, and so every Saturday and Sunday a group of college BYU students go to visit elderly people in retirement homes, and it's super fun to get to chat with them and help them because it's pretty lonely living there. A lot of them don't have family nearby, so that's been one of my favorite service opportunities at BYU.
Through the YSERV program, they have like a refugee event. It's like the refugee group or whatever. They meet Wednesdays in the Wilk, usually like different rooms on the third floor, and it's so fun. They like tie quilts, they make like sleeping mats. It's super casual, you can just kind of walk in and leave whenever you have to go, and it's a really awesome opportunity to serve.
There's something called Y-Serve. It's located in the Wilkinson just right next to the lobby. They will give you all sorts of ideas for service and people that they have connections with. You can go help elementary kids with robotics or with reading. You can go clean up the community. There's lots of things you can do. You go help the Hispanic community. If you want to practice your Spanish because there's a million of those on BYU. Yeah, there's lots of opportunities to Y-Serve is one of the organizations that BYU has to help students get into the service community.
Y-Serve is a great place to go and find service opportunities. There is a way to sign up for emails from them to give you notices on activities and service opportunities, as well as the office in the Wilkinson Center where you can go. And I believe they have a website and possibly even some social media that you can find service opportunities at. So feel free to reach out. There's always need for service.
Why SERP is a super good service opportunity. They just have activities like I think every Wednesday or like every night they meet and it's just like a super easy way you just show up. I think they do like mat tying, there's all this stuff, like glasses sorting, like there's always just like ways to serve.
I think it's called the Y-Serv. They have so many ongoing activities. You can just check in passing through in the Wilk and even just work on something with just a few minutes of time. They have so many great ideas and resources if you're looking to maybe get some more meeting out of your day, maybe you're having a hard time. It's a great way to feel better is by focusing on someone else and the Y-Serv group does a great job with that.
I think a service opportunity that is so underutilized is just the YSERV office located on campus and the reason that it's underutilized is because they have a service activity for any kind and type of service that you want to do. There have been moments where organizations that I've worked with they wanted us to become familiar with it so me and my team would go into YSERV office just in the middle of the Wilk is where it is and we would just say hey we have like 10 minutes is there anything we can do and we wrote letters to veteran writing letters to veterans is an option we've made hats for people in need just like and I'm not very good at making hats but they taught me how to do it and streamline it it made it very simple so you can get involved in formal projects where there's a weekly or monthly commitment or something or you can just go give 10 minutes of your day brighten someone else's day brighten yours serve others so just go to the YSERV office and if you have five minutes they can find something for you to do.
If you're looking for service opportunities here on campus, your best bet would be to go to the YSERV office, which is located on the central or the main floor of the Wilk. They have a lot of service opportunities there. They have things that you can do just for like 30 minutes, 10 minutes at a time, but they also have things that like that can fulfill more hours. Like you can sign up for like these, there's these like groups that meet on campus that do service projects, and so like you can sign up through the YSERV to volunteer for those. And yeah, that's for if you're looking for something like to fulfill a service, that's where I went for my American heritage. And yeah, it's a great place to go.
Man, well BYU has lots of opportunities to serve. That's one of my favorite things about BYU is they make service accessible. Sometimes it's just difficult to find ways to serve outside of your daily routine. They have a club called Y-Serve. Definitely get involved with that. They have a bunch of programs you can look into and you can pick one and you can have a regular and routine service activity weekly, even if you want.
This has probably already been shared, but if you go to BOUYC or YServe, they just have a lot of opportunities that you can do each week. Honestly, if you're too busy to get into a specific program, just pray for them. Pray for specific opportunities to serve others, and then once you have time or are able to fill out your schedule and figure out the different things that you can do, then go to YServe. Start small and then grow big.
So besides the typical YSERV, BYU has something called the Ballard Center. The Ballard Center is a place where students can work on a social project that they're, or a social issue that they're passionate about, whether it's poverty, gender inequality, LGBTQ, health concerns, lack of clean water, whatever your social issue that you're worried about, you can go and you, it's a, the Ballard Center is a resource. They have internships, they have classes, they have clubs, and everything you do through them is really service. You can also get funding up to $25,000 to go and country, to like the country of your choice to solve a social issue. If you come to me and you're like, Hey, I have, I figured out how to solve world hunger. I'm like, great, let's do it. So the Ballard Center is a really cool places in the Marriott Center. And it's definitely something to look into.
I would check out YServe. They have a lot of programs that you can you can do once, you can come do regularly, and there are so many. I cannot tell you all the ones that are on there, but they have this little card and you can just go in and ask someone about it and they'll tell you. Another really great thing to use is JustServe. There are a lot of service opportunities on there as well, and they are just here local in Provo. They're not necessarily created by BYU, but I know there's a there's like a soup kitchen sort of thing where you can help serve people food, or there are opportunities to do things just kind of on your own. Like I know some of the options there's like you can write letters to inmates, or you can help make masks right now for the pandemic, and so there's just a lot of opportunities. I'm sure you'll find something that fits your personality because there are a lot.
BYU has a lot of different opportunities available to students to serve others, but one in particular that I really enjoyed going to was the YServe club. So in the Wilkinson Center there's like a YServe office and when you go in there they have different projects that you can come in and work on and you can go in whenever is convenient for you and you can leave whenever you need to and I really liked doing that. They had different projects throughout the year, some that they're doing or that I that they did and I was helping with them were like writing cards to health care workers, knitting hats and things like that and so I really liked that because it was easy to find time in my schedule to do and it was just on campus.
BYU has something called YServe. I definitely go there and just get some some way to serve, like join one project. I've joined Spanish interpreters. I found that's been super fun. With that one you just go around to different like junior highs and elementaries around the area and you help translate Spanish, translate like parent-teacher conferences and stuff like that from Spanish to English or vice versa. Well yeah, I mean the parents often speak Spanish but the teachers will speak English so you just have to help with that. But at the YServe there's a lot of cool things to do.
So the YSERV office on campus, you can walk in there like most times during like normal working day and like do different service things. I feel like a lot of times there's like letter writing going on or like crocheting or different things or like knitting, but they also have a lot of programs that you can like enroll in or you don't like enroll because it's not a class, but that you can like sign up for or you can do different things. You can go to a food bank, you can help like tutor kids at like a middle school close by or different things like that. So definitely look at YSERV and like see all the programs that they offer and you'll definitely find something that fits your time and your schedule and your interests.
I think there are so many opportunities at BYU to serve but my favorite one that I've ever done is volunteer at a elementary school, the one that's right next to BYU. I think it's called Wasatch Elementary. I got to go there and help little kids learn how to read and that was super fun for me and it's just great to get outside of myself and help others learn.
There are so many good service opportunities at BYU. It's super easy to find service opportunities through YSERV, and so if you're looking for some good service to do you can go in the WILC and they usually have a booth set up or just go online look up YSERV and they have so many different opportunities that are like either super short or longer, whatever fits your needs well.
In addition to the YSERP office, there's also like so many service things that just like go on at BYU. Like for MLK Day every year, they have like a really big service day like Outreach Day. There's like always a lot of like refugee nights where you can like help make kits and different things that they're going to send to refugees and like where they send that is going to depend on when you're at BYU and what's going on in the world at the time. So that's kind of cool to be able to realize like oh look I am helping people that like are being impacted right now by whether like it's like fires or natural disasters or different things that have happened. So like keep your eye out. There's like always posters and things of like random service events that are going on and then a lot of like the different schools at BYU will also like host their own like school-wide service things that are going on. So just keep your eye out and you'll be able to see them.
One of my best, like, top recommendations is something called the Sorensen Center. If you want to get involved with, like, really any, like, type of service project, the Sorensen Center has a lot of really cool opportunities for, like, multicultural diversification, minority, things like that. They have some really cool services, especially around, like, general conference. Like, they try to share the gospel in new and unique ways. So Sorensen Center is a great alternative to YSERV if you're just not in the YSERV mood.
So there's a lot of great service opportunities at BYU obviously, but one thing I would highly recommend is going to the YSERV website, and from there you can find a bunch of different opportunities to serve. And I believe if you go into the BYU Student Center at the Wilk, they have a YSERV thing there and you can just find daily service activities to do or other more long-term things that you would like to do. But I would definitely recommend going to the YSERV website.