Community Service Home Page

Welcome to our Community Service Page.

On this page you will find our Rules for Community Service, an example of how students should maintain their community service websites and some help videos. Some things to remember:

1. It’s a good idea to check with the person organizing the community service if they will have Volunteer Verification Letters for you at the end of your service or if they will be emailing them to you. Of course, you can carry this Simple Volunteer Verification Letter with you to the service event. The City of Pico Rivera has its own form.

2. Take a picture of you at the event. Make sure the organizer’s tent is in the background or something else that can be used to identify the event.

3. Have fun. Bring friends and family.

Why community service:

As the SATs and ACTs have been made obsolete by the Cal State and UC systems, we realize that schools have adjusted their requirements for granting acceptances. Some colleges will place greater importance on school activities, like student government, sports, and the performing arts. Other colleges focus on strength of class schedule, or in other words, how many of the AP/IB classes offered at your high school did you take? A third option colleges are looking on placing greater importance on is Community Service. 

AVID places a goal of 20 hours of community service  per year, so at the end of four years of AVID, students should have earned a minimum of 80 hours. Students are required to document their hours on a website, which we hope provides other benefits. One of those benefits is a chance to reflect on why community service is important. Our hope is students learn the value of helping others and the sense of community and accomplishment that it brings.

And in a world where googling a person to find their social media posts as a means to get to know them is normal, we hope that if a college admissions advisor decides to google one of our students, they will find this community service website.