DOING GOOD
by Elin Hert

How are the kids you ask? They’re doing good. And no, I don’t mean “well,” I mean Good. While every edition of the newspaper brings fuel for disparaging thoughts on the state of the world, one observation worth celebrating is that an entire generation – our children – seems to be growing up with a big-picture sense of the world, a developing second-nature empathy for others, and a healthy desire to save the planet.

Under a microscope, my own random sample of budding activists looks something like this: A Wyoming friend’s high school sophomore just returned from a three-week service trip to Ghana with a small group of students who stayed in a village where they planted organic vegetable gardens, built a foundation for a library, and taught elementary school classes to African children. From Seattle, my sister-in-law and her daughter flew to New Orleans to help restore the broken down, post-Katrina city with Habitat for Humanity. In Connecticut, a friend’s child’s school raised money to purchase mosquito nets to help African people protect themselves against malaria, and in another effort donated backpacks, school supplies, and funds to schools in need in South America.

Closer to home, we’ve got kids proverbially rubbing elbows with girls in Pakistan, learning about their plight, and collecting Pennies for Peace to provide them with better opportunities. In a heartbeat after the Haiti earthquake, kids’ micro businesses were up and running, selling everything from cookies to used books in order to get water to those without. Last fall, Bozeman children were going door to door touting the benefits of supporting the local economy via a Made-in-Montana school fundraiser, and over the holiday season, schools were going full tilt with food drives that provided thousands of pounds of canned goods to the local food bank.

When I zoom in closer, I can see even smaller things. In the course of a week, my daughter attended a birthday party where gifts were nixed in favor of a registration fee for a fun-run that raised money for cancer. That same day she received an invitation for another birthday party, which read, “In lieu of gifts, please bring a toy for a dog or cat, which will be donated to the Heart of the Valley Animal Shelter.” A friend’s fourth grader shook her piggy bank and gave money to a political candidate who she wanted to win. A child-run paper recycling center is fully functioning in our home.

It wasn’t like this when I was a child. Aside from “the starving children of Ethiopia,” which was very real, though, unfortunately, mentioned only as a ploy to get kids of my generation to eat our peas, most of my peers had very little awareness of the plight of the rest of the world. When I was growing up, it was the responsibility of the parents, the place of worship, and the Girl and Boy Scout troops to make sure that the world was being saved.

These days, parents are often doing their part to save the world in partnership with their children, and schools and non-profit organizations are playing a significant role in our children’s exposure to doing good as well. Many non-profit organizations, in fact, are consciously reaching out to their new market – kids. While all of this might sound opportunistic or even exploitive at first, it seems to me a wonderful, life-forming opportunity for our children, many of whom are taking on the role of part-of-the-solution, caring members of society with zeal.
Schools, often through designated honorable or celebratory days, such as Human Rights Day, Martin Luther King Day, and Earth Day, offer up speakers and experiences that bring the meaning of these significant days closer to home. This year, Earth Day brought the traveling “Bozone Ozone Bus” (BOB) to Bozeman schools where kids got to plant seeds, get in the bus to see what was growing, and learn what type of matter goes into compost. For Human Rights Day last year, one elementary school hosted members of MSU’s Engineers Without Borders to talk about the water systems they’re installing in Africa. This year, local hipster Kina Pickett told the student body how being an extreme skier celebrity was awesome and fun, but it wasn’t enough, so he co-founded his non-profit, Greenscool, which brings solar lights and heat to schools in poverty-stricken areas around the globe so that kids can attend more school and learn about renewable energy. These are real, local, accessible people who will likely inspire and enthuse our school-aged kids.

Non-profit organizations are also reaching out to kids. The Central Asia Institute’s Pennies for Peace program targets school-aged children and has raised their awareness while raising funds to help its cause. The Jane Goodall Institute’s Roots and Shoots program offers materials so adults can set up programs in their town to help meet the non-profit’s goal of “encouraging youth of all ages to take action to improve the world through service learning projects that promote care and concern for animals, the environment, and the human community.” Save the Children reaches out to schools in their hometown of Westport, Connecticut, teaching about their cause while getting kids involved.

Parents play a huge role, not only by encouraging our children to get involved and supporting all of the aforementioned fundraisers, but by virtue of the benevolent endeavors we partake in for the sake of sharing our values and teaching by example. This might mean fostering homeless dogs until a permanent home is found, handing the kids bags and trolling the neighborhood for garbage, taking them to farmers’ markets so they can understand the goodness of locally grown produce and the importance of stimulating the local economy, and bringing them with us to hear speakers talk about whatever we think is important for them to know.

Large and small, all of these efforts and experiences become a part of our children. They stimulate discussion, open their eyes to the realities of our world, and instill a sense of pride in doing good. Perhaps most importantly, they serve as a new alternative to getting – and that is giving.

Elin Hert is a Bozeman freelance writer and mom. She is a regular contributor to Montana Parent magazine.