The CAS Guide defines Service as "collaborative and reciprocal engagement with the community in response to an authentic need*."
Service in CAS is meant to help students explore and understand their capacity to make meaningful contributions to their community and society. It is thus often the most transformative element of the CAS program. Service should benefit all parties involved: students learn as they identify and address authentic community needs, and the community benefits through reciprocal collaboration.
When defining "community," consideration must be made to situation and culture. The community may be the school, but IB recommends that students extend their service experience into the local, national and/or international community. Students should by no means feel they must do service that involves international travel or contacts. Acting locally while seeking to understand the global context of an issue is encouraged.
Approaches to Service
Service experiences may fall into one of the following four categories:
Direct Service: Student interaction involves people, the environment or animals. Examples include one-on-one tutoring, walking dogs at a shelter, or planting trees.
Indirect Service: Students do not interact directly with the recipients of indirect service, but make contributions that meet an authentic need nonetheless. Examples include designing a website for non-profit group, audio recording of books to aid in teaching or nurturing tree seedlings for planting.
Advocacy: Students speak on behalf of a cause or concern to promote action on an issue of public interest. For example, running a public service campaign on hunger, performing a play to promote intercultural understanding or creating a video on sustainable water use.
Research: Students collect information through various sources, analyze data and report on a topic of importance to influence policy or practice. For example, they may conduct environmental surveys.
Service experiences may take any of the following forms:
Ongoing service: Regular and frequent service experience, such as weekly tutoring or weekly visits to a nursing home.
School-based service: Students are encouraged to use experiences gained in the school community as the basis for extending into the community. For example, a student who starts out by tutoring ES children may use that experience later when tutoring at a refugee center.
Community-based service: Understanding of and contact with the local community advances student awareness and understanding of social issues and solutions. Regular and frequent contact is the preferred mode in this case.
Immediate need service: Students quite often want to respond to disasters and crisis situations. It is important that they take the time to understand the context and determine the most effective means and recipient of their planned response.
Fundraising: No fundraising may take place without thorough investigation and understanding of the context and issue. Students must also engage in advocacy so that the fundraising doesn't occur in a vacuum. ISP guidelines for fundraising can be found here.
International service: Students are encouraged to participate locally in service before considering service opportunities outside their country. Students only benefit from serving in an international context when able to make clear links to parallel issues in their local environs and the understand the consequences of their service. It is required that students thoroughly discuss this with the CAS Coordinator before embarking on international service experiences. A risk-assessment analysis is also required.
Volunteerism: Students may volunteer in service experiences organized by other students, the school or an external group. They should understand the context of and need for their service.
Service learning: Students are encouraged to use their academic studies as a jumping-off point for service. For example, after studying freshwater ecology in ESS, students may decide to monitor and improve a local water system.
Examples of Service at ISP
Community Service Club
Cater Prague
NHS
Peer tutoring
Motol Hospital volunteer - application on their website in Czech only
Greenpeace volunteer - application on their website in English and Czech
*All of the information and quotes on this page are from the CAS Guide, 2015, published by IB. Some of the information has been paraphrased in the interest of brevity and clarity, and some has been taken verbatim.