Since the Eaton and Palisades fires, I keep hearing one question: “How can I help?” I live in North Pasadena and was evacuated. My family is fortunate that our house survived but just a few blocks away, neighbor after neighbor lost everything. Rebuilding will not be easy. As a historian who studies cities, public health and immigration, I know that immediate, individual offerings of help, however heartfelt and concrete, simply won’t be enough.
In addition to federal, state and local government disaster relief, we need long-term, institutional commitments, efforts that are integrated into our infrastructure, programs that help people learn how to respond in an ongoing way to the devastation of massive fires or whatever the next disaster may be. Absent such structures, people eventually return to their daily lives, which are demanding enough and increasingly atomized from broader communities.
At USC, where I teach, I see the challenge and part of the solution in microcosm.
My students are bright and compassionate individuals, but volunteering and what educators call “service learning” don’t fit easily alongside their primary goals — academic achievement, getting a degree, graduating. After all, the most common question they are asked about their futures is “What’s your plan after graduation?” It’s rarely part of our culture to ask, “How will you serve, volunteer or give back?”
The well-documented decline of social-emotional skills in Gen Z post-pandemic doesn’t help build sustained, meaningful community engagement either.
I’ve been volunteering at a Red Cross shelter where I’ve observed 20-somethings who are hesitant to step forward and say, “I can help.” They have computer skills, organizational skills, even EMT skills, but they often wait to be asked or told what to do. It’s not surprising — these young people spent their high school years in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, communicating primarily through text and DM, even when the person they were talking to was in the same room or car with them.
Last semester, I designed a series of field trips to introduce my class to grassroots, community-driven projects in Los Angeles. When I asked them to take the Metro and meet me in downtown L.A., just a 5-mile ride away on light rail, some admitted they had never been on a Metro train and had rarely ventured beyond what we began to call their “bubble.”
How limiting are the students’ bubbles? I used to walk into classrooms buzzing with conversation. Now I enter quiet rooms where everyone’s head is down, looking at a phone. Even in small classes, many of my students may not know one another’s names.
This social insulation is not a phenomenon limited to private university kids. While you might assume otherwise, USC students are a diverse lot — 22% of this year’s incoming class are first-generation college students. And the financial aid is robust: First-year students from U.S. families earning $80,000 or less with typical assets can attend USC tuition-free.
USC has in place a widely-praised, 50-year-old Joint Educational Program that offers service learning, work-study and volunteer opportunities to students. More than 2,000 take advantage of it each year. JEP students can make meaningful community contributions, often earning course credit for their work outside the classroom. That said, the program currently engages only a small portion of USC’s 21,000 undergraduates, leaving significant opportunities to expand and deepen student and nonprofit participation.
The complexities of fostering a strong “give back” ethos in a school setting aren’t unique to USC. In examining the impact of the pandemic on students’ educational experiences, the 2021 National Survey of Student Engagement reported that first-year participation in service learning, as well as senior participation in internships, saw declines of about 30% and 22%, respectively. Even study abroad, which students often hope to do, took a 25% hit. From my vantage point, the pandemic lull continues.
And yet in the outpouring of support for fire victims, I’ve seen one school nimbly pivot into action for the losses in its community. Within a day of the fires, L.A.’s Loyola High School quickly stepped up with a donation drive. A fellow professor and Loyola alum described their efforts as “contemplatives in action” — a testament to a faith-based culture but also to the service structure built into the school’s curriculum: Loyola students must complete at least 120 hours of community service before graduation.
Loyola’s example invites us to ask: What might it look like to make service part of the curriculum, a requirement at the university level, rather than something added on top of everything else?
Universities like mine can build on the service learning they sponsor. Let’s make it a condition for graduation for all majors, or at the very least, offer it as a substitute for a required course. The 2025 fires, and the short-, near- and long-term effort that will be needed to help the city recover, highlight the goal: We need a better way to tap into and create a cohort of students experienced in community engagement and ready to provide a sustained answer to the question, “How can I help?”
Natalia Molina is a professor of American studies and ethnicity at USC. Her latest book is “A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community.”
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