Young People Wellness & Volunteerism Conference essay first place winner was a  Alexa Colding a 13 year old student from Yulee Florida.   

Wellness and Volunteerism

I believe that volunteering will help you be a better person and help you understand a lot more about others. When I help someone that needs my help it makes me feel better inside knowing that I helped them. Volunteering and helping someone who is less fortunate than me lets me know that I did something for them and made them and myself feel better! Wellness is very important too! For example, if you do drugs, drink, or smoke then you basically ruin your life, those are some examples of things that you shouldn’t do to yourself because later on in life, that could effect how you act. Understanding wellness is important because you should always take care of your self and keep yourself happy and healthy.

If I were to help volunteer in a campaign to persuade teenagers not to drink and drive or do drugs, it would help me better understand and see what they did wrong to not do that to myself also help me learn how bad it could take effect and change my life a lot more than I know now. Some people go overseas just to volunteer for helping build houses for people that don’t have one! It would help them understand how we live today and how great our life is by seeing how other people live that don’t have houses or anything like us, it would help us see how fortunate we are and how we should not take what we have for granted . Volunteering isn’t just about doing it because you know that’s the right thing to do. It’s about wanting to do it just out of the kindness of your heart.

Wellness and volunteerism go together because they have to do with helping yourself and others. Helping someone else sometimes teaches you a lesson about life either when you are young or older. Its important to learn this while you are young so you don’t make any mistakes later on in life and regret it, because if you don’t know about this before you start getting into things that could change your life forever then your life isn’t going to be all that you thought it would and you cant do most of the things that you have been dreaming of doing. I am only in middle school but I know that there is a lot more I can do to help and I would like to learn a lot more about volunteering so it could help me be a better person and show me or teach me about things that are right and things that are wrong.

I would also like to know about where to go and what to do so that I can help volunteer so that I can help others. It would be good to have someone maybe come to our school and tell us about wellness and volunteering so that others would appreciate it more and want to do something to help someone.