The Importance of Passion
By Lily Casavant
Blogger and YR intern Lily Casavant (center) with campers at TEENPOWER
Passion is what pushes us to move forward in life. With passion there is purpose, and with purpose, there is action. It is important to find an outlet through which you can use your passion to serve others.
It is easy to do a lot of volunteer work without having passion for it. Volunteering for the college resume (or any resume) is much different than volunteering for the genuine passion that you have for the work. That is why many volunteers, myself included, come back for Youth Resources’ TEENPOWER leadership conferences each year. I no longer have a college resume to work for, but I continue to engage with this program because of the love I have for it. What I love most about TEENPOWER is that the volunteer staff members are shaping amazing leaders and teaching important life lessons, all while having so much fun. You could have been involved for one year or ten, and you will always be welcomed back with joy, respect, and compassion.
Sometimes a passion project might not be as easily found. In this case, you can make your own! My senior year of high school I had to develop a volunteer project as part of my school’s curriculum. I tried to think of my passions and what I could do to create a project to incorporate them. I love Disney, so integrating that into any project would have me very interested. In addition, I love working with young kids. So I brainstormed with my friend Arjun, and we came up with a project through which we taught children the importance of kindness and manners. However, we didn’t just teach them from our perspective but from that of fairy tale characters! I played Princess Belle and Arjun played Aladdin. It was an amazing opportunity to teach these young children about an important lesson in a fun and engaging way.
Lily as Disney’s Belle
If you would like to develop a project of your own, the first thing to do is research. See if there is already a project in place that you can help with, or a certain organization or charity that correlates with your passion. Talk to your parents or a teacher about getting the project off the ground and talk to your peers about how they can get involved.
When you are passionate about something, people can see it when you talk about it. You visibly get excited, your face lights up, and you can’t seem to stop talking about it. During all of my scholarship interviews, I was asked to speak about what I was passionate about. I always talked about my volunteer project, and I found that I wasn’t nervous when I would speak about it because the words came so easily.
Tapping into your passions not only makes you a more effective volunteer, but also makes volunteering fun. The resume boost is an added bonus.
About the Blogger 
Lily Casavant graduated from Signature School and is currently attending the University of Southern Indiana. She has participated in TEENPOWER for six years and is a Youth Resources’ summer intern.
I love that you talked about being able to create a program that will teach kids kindness and manners. These days we badly need that to ensure that they grow into adults that respect others and avoid violence. It would be nice to have a youth conference speaker that would be teaching that to my children in schools or in other organizations. As a parent, I still need the help of experts to actually instill the lessons they need to learn in life which can be for their own benefit as well.