Local Youth Give Back, Learn More in Return
July 14, 2025
• A new group of student volunteers joined the Volunteers Around Needham to assist local organizations while earning community service hours.
In the span of two months, Needham youth will have cleaned up graffiti, sorted donated clothes, plucked weeds and thrown a party with senior citizens — all during their summer break.
Volunteers Around Needham connects youth in seventh through 12th grade with community service opportunities across town, in an effort to help them fulfill their required volunteer hours, but also engage with people and places they wouldn’t otherwise, said Tony Serio, the town’s community outreach clinician who facilitates the program.
High schoolers need 60 volunteer hours in order to graduate, and with the VAN Program, they can knock out half of them, should they attend every three-hour session.
“What’s great about the VAN program is you can take a taste and try it out for the first time,” Serio said. “Especially if you’re a middle schooler, if you really enjoy it, you can tell your parents, ‘Oh I really enjoyed it. I want to do a full commitment, three or four days a week there, to get my community service hours done.’”
Starting last week, a small group visited Temple Beth Shalom to fold sweatshirts and cut out pictures staff will use for future storytimes. On Monday morning, volunteers walked through Cricket Field to clean up the fields and the graffiti there.
And last Tuesday, six students sifted through donations at Circle of Hope, a nonprofit that supplies goods for people experiencing housing insecurity. As they lifted boxes and trekked up and down stairs, the nonprofit’s Community Engagement Manager Christina Ruddy expressed appreciation.
“This is a group of hard-working, Needham-based teenagers,” she said. “They’re always willing to do any job.” She called it “a great partnership,” now several years running.
Needham Youth and Family Services has operated VAN for more than 25 years, starting with a pilot in the summer of 1998, according to records shared by Director Sara Shine. Repeat organizations include the Center at the Heights, the Needham Fire Department, the Charles River Center and Needham Parks and Forestry, among others.
Shine sees the program as a value to both teens and the local businesses they support.
“We’ve been able, over the years, to connect with countless organizations and departments to create this partnership where we organize the students, get them together, get everything they need to do whatever task is needed, and then provide those tasks to those organizations,” she said.
Following positive feedback, VAN expanded into students’ February and April school vacations a few years ago.
The exposure to different organizations allows students to connect with their community and help those in need, Shine added. That charge was on full display at Circle of Hope, where the young volunteers learned about how people fall into homelessness and how prevalent the issue is in Massachusetts.
Rising sophomores George Currie and Max Cummings unboxed new sneakers from Soles4Souls, a nonprofit that made a donation to Circle of Hope. The pair also volunteered at TBS the preceding morning — what was supposed to be an outdoor playground clean-up became an indoor sorting exercise, given the high temperatures.
Community service, for Currie, feels like he’s benefiting the community. Cummings expressed a similar sentiment.
“It feels good because just going today makes a big difference,” Cummings said. “It feels good to help out instead of doing something else.”
Paige Manning, a rising eighth grader, said she learned more about Circle of Hope’s mission during her volunteering.
“They help people get materials and stuff that they need when they aren’t able to,” she said.
Volunteers will also make future stops at the Needham Community Council and Needham Community Farm.
New boxes of Uniqlo clothes piled from floor to ceiling in the nonprofit’s basement overflow area, where teens hoisted winter jackets and plastic bins onto shelves at organizers’ direction. They rearranged the space to accommodate donations, even as someone stopped by to drop off her own gently used apparel.
That hands-on work drives their guiding values home.
“We feel strongly that it’s really important that the kids know why they’re doing this, not just folding and sorting clothes, but that they understand a bigger picture of homelessness in Massachusetts,” grant writer Leslie Levenson said.
While at TBS, Serio said students also can learn about Needham’s Jewish community and their operations. That vital exposure weaves into other volunteer opportunities — at Wingate Senior Living, students will engage in an “intergenerational” program with seniors. It marks VAN’s first year partnering with them.
“A lot of the senior residents that live there are battling isolation and those type of things” he said, “so just having kids there to engage with them and help out with their normal activities, I think, is going to be a really great match for us.”
The program runs through Aug. 19.
