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Service in CAS: Make a Meaningful Contribution
Service in CAS: Make a Meaningful Contribution
Collaborative and reciprocal engagement with the community in response to an authentic need.
Understanding Your Impact
The "Service" strand helps students realize their ability to make a significant difference in their community and society. Through service, students develop essential skills such as decision-making, problem-solving, initiative, responsibility, and accountability.
What you will learn from service:
Self-Awareness: Service promotes personal growth and self-awareness.
Diverse Interactions: Offers varied experiences and opportunities for global understanding.
Community and Collaboration: Students address real community needs, benefiting both themselves and the community through mutual cooperation.
Best Practices for Service
Use CAS Stages: Follow the CAS stages for effective service experiences.
Unpaid Service: Service experiences must be unpaid and align with the IB mission and learner profile.
Broaden Community: Extend service beyond the school to local, national, and international communities.
Local and Global Impact
Local Focus: Engage in local service to build relationships and observe sustained change.
Global Connections: Expand local efforts to a global scale through partnerships and technology.
Reflect and Learn
Purposeful Reflection: Reflect on service experiences to find personal significance and inspiration.
Service Learning Model: Apply knowledge and skills to meet community needs, linking academic disciplines with service activities.
Service in CAS is about recognizing your capacity to contribute meaningfully to society, developing key skills, and fostering personal growth. Engage in local and global service, collaborate with others, and reflect on your experiences to make a lasting impact.
Four types of service action
It is recommended that students engage with different types of service within their CAS programme. These types of action are as follows.
Direct service: Involves people, the environment or animals. For example, this can appear as one-on-one tutoring, developing a garden in partnership with refugees, or working in an animal shelter.
Indirect service: Though students do not see the recipients of indirect service, they have verified their actions will benefit the community or environment. For example, this can appear as re-designing a non-profit organization’s website, writing original picture books to teach a language, 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, this may appear as initiating an awareness campaign on hunger, performing a play on replacing bullying with respect, or creating a video on sustainable water solutions.
Research: Students collect information through varied sources, analyse data, and report on a topic of importance to influence policy or practice. For example, they may conduct environmental surveys to influence their school, contribute to a study of animal migration, compile effective means to reduce litter in public spaces, or conduct social research by interviewing people on topics such as homelessness, unemployment or isolation.
Examples of service include:
Raising funds for an orphanage
Helping at an animal shelter
Volunteering at a retirement home or youth centre
Helping in your school (e.g., CAS committee or student council)
Speaking out about an injustice
Finding out about the water quality
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