With Purpose Success, part 21

But be certain of this: success in your life going forward will center on purpose. It is critical that you find your purpose and pursue it with the same ambition and energy that has led you to material or social success the last few decades.
It's time to get going. As a generation, we have a lot of ground to make up and we're in some danger of being lapped by those who are much younger than we are. Success of the type I am writing about is already being experienced on a massive scale by schoolchildren who regularly hold a car wash or bake sale to raise relief funds after a natural disaster.
When she was just five years old, Katherine Commale of Hopewell, Pennsylvania, used an old pizza box and her dolls to build a simple diorama of an African family at sleep in their hut. Using a small plastic bug and a piece of fabric, she developed a short skit showing how a mosquito net could save the lives of poor villagers by guarding them from malaria as they sleep. Katherine and her mother still take the skit to area churches every Christmas and raise thousands of dollars to buy mosquito nets, which they send overseas.
This kind of success is built around purpose and empathy-and action-and it's being incorporated into many younger people's lives as a matter of course and education. Giving back isn't just something you have to wait to do after age fifty or sixty. More than three million college students in the United States volunteer each year. That's nearly a third of the university population, and this cohort's volunteer rate is growing faster than any other. Some sixteen million teens in the United
States participate in some kind of formal volunteer work and contribute more than 1.3 billion hours of service, according to the Corporation for
National & Community Service, a federal agency that promotes volunteerism.
That's an amazing 55 percent volunteer rate. Much of this is arranged through schools, but only 5 percent of teens say they volunteer because it is a school requirement. Many students were stirred to action by the events of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and have flocked to rebuilding programs. But others were already taking an interest in mentoring younger students.
In recent years, more high schools have begun to introduce a service obligation as part of their curriculum, and the hottest trend these days in college spring breaks is a vacation that may include tilling the fields in a poor farm community or tutoring migrant workers. Through an organization like Teach For America (www.teachforamerica.org) many thousands of newly minted college graduates sign on for a two-year stint to teach in poor rural or urban neighborhoods in an effort to spread educational equality.
Campus Compact (www.compact.org), a coalition of 1,100 public and private universities, is another student-focused organization that has taken wing. Through it, some twenty million young people have volunteered in thousands of communities around the world. They tutor at-risk youth, help build homes in poor neighborhoods and care for the sick and hungry.