What Is The Importance Of Giving Back Essay

I grew up in a tight-knit family that taught me the importance of giving back before I could understand the meaning of it for myself. Since I was very young, my family and I would volunteer at the soup kitchen or the food bank. It was as natural to me as sitting down together for dinner; it was what we had always done. It was as natural to me as sitting down to dinner together was—just what we had always done.
As I grew older, I started to learn where the compassion and gratitude that was ingrained in me had started: our heritage. My great-grandparents were immigrants who had to abandon their home country of Austria during the Holocaust. In America, they had to start over, and learned to value family, community, and love of others more than the material items they had left behind. My grandparents, too, valued hard work, family, and giving back above all else.
Today, thanks to my grandparents and parents’ strong values, I have discovered that giving back has become an inextricable part of who I am. I volunteered on my own last summer with a local organization for little girls aged 5-7, which provided them meals and a safe place during the long summer days. On one of my first days, I came across a girl who had …show more content…
Because of this feeling of gratitude for what I have been given, I now realize I will always give back. Whether I am volunteering at a summer camp, working at a soup kitchen, or spending time helping my grandparents, I want to be a part of the change that is creating a better world. This realization has influenced my decision to study public health and policy, and to continue to search for new ways that I can make a difference for the better in the lives of those in my community, just like my great-grandparents would have wanted, and like my grandparents and parents have always taught