March 2018
During the past two summers, another Leilehua band alumnus and I have organized a leadership camp for the band leaders. Some of the lessons that we emphasized during the camp were Service and Fellowship; service in the sense that because they are leaders they have a responsibility to be servants to the band. Because they are leaders, they have to sacrifice more to create a better program. The hard part was getting them to convince themselves that they need to sacrifice more: not because they have to, but because they want to. We wanted to make them feel the same passion and dedications to the program that we had and still have. And once that passion is built it will be easier to create bonds of fellowship in their program.
This is exactly what Kiwanis does for the children of the world. We are building student leaders by engaging them in community projects. We are not hand-feeding them service projects. Rather, we are getting them involved in the process--they are looking for their own projects and organizing them themselves. By engaging them at this level, we hope that they develop a sense of civic responsibility; that in order to make difference in the world, you may have to sacrifice something. But what really matters is that they willing to sacrifice their time, make donations, etc. The world needs to be filled with more people who WANT to serve and give their time to make a difference. And that is what we teach our students.
~ Aladdin Roque-Dangaran