#1 What Are They?
In the last few weeks, community helpers have been in the news a lot.
We have heard stories about firemen, police officers, paramedics, medical personnel
and construction workers. All of them have been helping the community.
Community helpers include many more than these people, though.
To know what a community helper is, first you need to know what a community is.
A community is made up of different groups of people
who live and work together. The community has a specific location
(it is in one place), it has rules and laws that people must follow and
the people work together to solve their problems. The very smallest unit
which could be called a community is you r family, then comes your
neighborhood, and finally the town or city that you live in.
So what is a community helper?
A community helper is anyone in the community who helps others by providing
a service of some kind. The easy ones to think of are the Police Force,
the Fire Service and the Emergency Medical Services. There are many, many
more, though. How many can you think of?
First, think about your own home. Your Mom can be considered a
community helper. In your family it is probably your mom who cooks the
dinner, cleans the house, does the laundry and helps in a thousand different
ways everyday. If no one did those jobs, just imagine what would happen to
your family, it would stop being a community and become a disaster instead.
Not all families do have a Mom, and they are still a community, so who does
all the jobs in those families? Well, there is Dad and Grandma, maybe a
housekeeper or a gardener, a babysitter, older brothers and sisters,
the list goes on and on. Everyone can be a community helper.
Just suppose you clean up your room. It is only your room; you don’t share it with
anyone. Do you think that would make you a community helper? The answer is
not really, because you are helping your Mom and yourself but you are not
helping the whole community. To be a community helper you would have to do
something that helped everyone, so cleaning the living room would make you
a community helper.
Next, let’s think about community helpers in your neighborhood.
There is the mail carrier, the sanitation workers, maybe a school crossing
guard, a baker and of course the emergency services, which include the Fire
Department, Police Department and Emergency Medical Services. Maybe you
have a health center in your neighborhood. If you do then you also have
doctors, nurses and dentists working to help your neighborhood community.
In the biggest community, your town or city, there are many more helpers.
There are lawmakers and government officials.
There are construction crews who help keep the roads under
repair and maintenance crews who fix the streetlights and traffic
signals to keep our streets safe. There are shopkeepers who provide
us with the things we need. There are teachers and janitors in school,
to help us learn in a clean safe place. In restaurants there are chefs
waiters and waitresses who help provide us with a good healthy meal.
There are parking attendants. The list goes on and on. Just about everyone
in the community is a helper in some way. That is what makes a community,
a group of people working together to make a better place for everyone.