Neighborhood resident Julie Mendelson knows about keeping kids out of trouble. After all, she spent 30 years as a school counselor.
The field, she says, changed tremendously over the course of her career.
“I was really very heavily involved with way more personal crisis issues with kids [near the end],” she says. “I was dealing with social service issues, kids from dysfunctional families who were starting to fall through the cracks.”
It was so stressful that, after she retired in 2001, she “knew she wanted to do something very different.”
Enter the Dallas Arboretum. Mendelson loves the outdoors, and thought volunteering there would be a way to re-introduce peace and beauty into her life.
“For 30 years I was cooped up – for lack of a better word – in a school building all day, looking out window and wishing I was outdoors,” she says. “When you step foot in the Arboretum, every stress, every worry, every care you may have just tends to evaporate.”
Mendelson started off in a general role. But it seems she just couldn’t stop herself from becoming involved in the lives of teenagers.
“I saw where there was this huge draw of high school kids to volunteer during major events,” she says. “I looked at the system they had for recruiting high school kids and realized nobody really had experience working in the schools.”
She is now a chairman of recruitment and retention on the volunteer advisory board. And so far, she’s had much success.
“We had a fabulous teenage turnout for Spring Blooms, the largest ever,” she says. “If you can imagine such a thing, we had 886 teenagers from 41 high schools. They donated 4,430 hours.”
Still, despite her accomplishments, Mendelson doesn’t kid herself about why most of the kids are there.
“Ninety nine percent of them are there to fulfill service requirements” for school programs, she says.
“But the hope is that they will enjoy it enough so that when they become an adult, that experience will transcend into an adult volunteer spirit.”
But probably more important to parents, she says, is that the Arboretum “provides a clean, safe, family-oriented environment” for kids.
“When you talk about 15-year-olds, that is something that means a lot to parents.”
Contact Nancy Alexander on teen volunteerism for the Arboretum at 214-515-6561.
