Value of Volunteering

It’s not about quitting his day job.

In fact, Hoover Zariani, program director for the Service Learning Center at Glendale Community College, said he misses being at work even when he is away at job-related conferences.

The center has been nationally recognized for incorporating service by students at nonprofit organizations into college credit classes.

As part of their lab time, for example, physics or chemistry students will conduct science experiments at area elementary schools. English class students may prepare a needs assessment report or write newsletter articles for a charitable organization. Computer students have performed data entry for the Kidspace Museum in Pasadena.

“Everybody wins,” said Zariani, who has an associate’s degree in humanities from Glendale College and is working on a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Cal State Los Angeles.

“The community benefits, professors have a different tool to teach whatever it is they are teaching, and students get job experience in their fields.”

An estimated 1,000 to 1,200 students participate in the program each year.

“An overwhelming majority of these have experiences that are life-changing,” he said, including many who opt to become teachers.

Glendale’s program, begun with a grant six years ago, was one of the first at the community college level. Others in the state have begun similar programs, including one that Zariani is helping to set up at Valley College in Valley Glen.

His goal at Glendale is twofold: for every student to take at least one class involving service learning, and for students to participate voluntarily.

Now Zariani, 32, is embarking on some serious volunteerism of his own. He began working Wednesday for a Glendale YMCA shelter with the children of women “who have finally left their abusive partners.

“Even if they have not been abused themselves, children from such situations are facing emotional problems and serious issues, especially when it comes to trusting males,” he said.

His biggest concern is with preteens, “an age group that we don’t pay much attention to,” he said.

“We talk about them, we talk down to them, but we don’t relate to them,” he said. “They are at the age where they either learn to solve life’s problems or we lose them.”

His next goal is to help establish an ongoing media literacy forum at Glendale College. Although he would like the program to be open to the community at large, he plans to target youngsters who spend hours in front of television, which Zariani said tends to “normalize” violence for them.

“There are often no negative consequences to the violence you see in the media,” he said. “That makes it sort of a ‘happy violence.’ If its negative aspects were explained, young people could reason and understand what they are watching better.”

Zariani stresses that he is not opposed to television. He credits it with introducing him to his own role models, the 20th century’s best-known proponents of nonviolence: Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

He recalls arriving in America from Tehran, Iran, with his family in 1978.

“Outside of school, my only interaction with the English language came from hours spent in front of the television,” he said. “One day I found myself watching a TV special on Martin Luther King’s birthday.

“I started reading about him. He has become one of my heroes.”

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