Looking for volunteer hours/opportunities? Jinglin Li, a student at the University of Minnesota, created an organization called Living Room Tutors, a volunteer organization that allows students to tutor other students. Living Room Tutors is a non-profit virtual organization that helps communities lessen the impact of school closures by connecting volunteer student mentors with students in need. Providing materials for students, families, and educators to help improve K-12 students’ learning experiences. The objective of the program is to help kids who have had their education abruptly interrupted maintain their academic accomplishment trajectories and aims to mitigate the impact of prolonged school closures during the COVID-19 Pandemic and to give students further access to free tutoring and resources. The organization is extremely widespread around the world and has tutors and tutees located in 37 total states in the United States of America and 23 countries. In 2023, 315 matches of tutees and tutors were made.
When speaking with Jinglin about how Living Room Tutors started and her experiences with tutoring she said:
“In my junior year of high school, I joined my school district’s Community Curriculum Council. It was here that I was first exposed to an uncomfortable truth about education: certain populations of students faced “opportunity gaps” in their academic trajectories. I learned that the arbitrary circumstances in which each of us is born such as race, ethnicity, zip code, and socioeconomic status determine whether or not we have adequate resources to thrive as learners.
When the pandemic first shut down schools, we began having conversations in my council meetings about how the pandemic would likely exacerbate already widening achievement gaps among students.
At home, I started to notice that my younger, elementary-aged siblings –who were not as comfortable using Google Classroom, Zoom, or email– were having a much more difficult transition to online learning.
As the big sister in the household, I naturally found myself helping my siblings navigate their new coursework. One particular night, after spending numerous hours tutoring my siblings, it occurred to me that not all families had an older sibling around to help out. I also knew that many of my peers were stuck at home, with ample free time.
Witnessing the friction of distance learning firsthand along with my knowledge of pre-existing opportunity gaps, I was inspired to start Living Room Tutors.
The more I work on Living Room Tutors, the more I realize how valuable the service is.
For instance, as someone who has tutored regularly through the program, I know that it’s not just the tutees that benefit from the tutor-tutee relationship.
Tutoring helped me understand the concepts I was learning on a deeper level. It is one thing to learn a concept just well enough to regurgitate that information on a test. It is another to understand the material deep enough to teach it to another person.
Beyond this, tutoring –and volunteering in general– has allowed me to develop many important soft skills like interpersonal communication, time management, responsibility, and creativity.
Through having to plan, schedule, and show up to tutoring sessions, I have learned how to be a more accountable, and organized person. During the tutoring sessions, I was constantly challenged to communicate ideas creatively. I often have to improvise and create examples or analogies for the concepts I am explaining.”
For students looking for volunteering opportunities, Living Room Tutors offers students the ability to create work around their schedule. How it works is a questionnaire is filled out by the tutor and asked what languages they prefer to teach and subjects the tutor is comfortable with teaching. The tutor is then matched with a corresponding tutee and information is exchanged. An amazing aspect of this program is that the tutor and tutee meet virtually and can find times that work best for them. To be a tutor the only requirements to be a tutor are to be a student and for tutoring sessions to be at least 30 minutes per week. Living Room Tutors take pride in the fact that the program is run by students. It is students helping other students. Tutoring is offered to those students who are in kindergarten to 12th grade.
This is an amazing opportunity for students to volunteer as the organization allows tutors to choose their schedules, build connections with younger students, gain teaching experience as well as help an international community to overcome academic challenges. The Living Room Tutors website contains many resources for students to utilize during their tutoring sessions. It is broken down into two sections tools and subjects. The subject section allows users to pick specific subjects to then find resources that can benefit the tutor to further help their assigned tutee. The organization also runs year-round tutoring sessions so tutors can continue to tutor students throughout the year.
So for students on campus looking for tutoring opportunities and volunteering hours, Living Room tutors is a great way to make connections with younger students and gain tutoring experience.
