Veterans Strengthening and Helping Move America Forward Through Citizenship and Service to Community and Country
Veterans Strengthening and Helping Move America Forward Through Citizenship and Service to Community and Country
Inspired by retired Army Civil Affairs Colonel Christopher Holshek’s Travels with Harley – Journeys in Search of Personal and National Identity, The National Service Ride Project is a community-based initiative that leverages motorcycling’s appeal to freedom, adventure, and moving forward to promote citizenship and service, starting right at home.
“Service doesn’t require a uniform,” he says in the project video. “When we become better citizens, we become a better country – because, when you serve your community, you serve your country.”
The project looks to help generate an empowering and unifying narrative about citizenship and service across societal and generational lines, promoting engagement and collaboration among many as one—e pluribus unum—and helping pass the baton of generational leadership to move a divided nation forward.
The project’s main platform is local events that any community can organize to bring together service veterans of many kinds looking to give back and young emerging citizens from many walks of life looking for ways to pay it forward. Schools, community-minded motorcycle clubs, and service-oriented civil society organizations can initiate, collaborate, and design events that best fit the needs and capacities of all involved, either as stand-alone events or as part of related initiatives.
These interactive sessions aim to help America’s youth understand the meaning and value of service and how they can help themselves by helping others, then show them pathways to service learning at local, national, and international levels.
The National Service Ride Project works informally. Adaptable and flexible, its multimedia-friendly platform brings together organizations that might otherwise not have reason to collaborate, extends their platforms and local initiatives, and improves outreach to youth in a unique and highly visible way, helping to boost awareness, membership, volunteerism, and fundraising.
Schools especially benefit from a scalable platform to encourage and enable service learning, which impacts educational outcomes and results in a better cohort of citizens and better-qualified sources of labor: America’s youth are the real winners! Service learning also improves a greater sense of community and helps combat many social problems and their costs.
It also helps military veterans connect with their communities positively and meaningfully, improving civil-military relations and generational partnering to ensure America's legacy of service lives on.
The National Service Ride Project is not funded by anyone or anything other than book sales of Travels with Harley.
You can look at over 100 reviews of those who have already read Travels with Harley on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Goodreads.
In addition to the book's many high-level endorsements, read these reviews of Travels with Harley in The Huffington Post: "Seeing American and Ourselves from the Outside In" and "Community and Contribution."
Talk about Travels with Harley on Goodreads, Facebook, or Twitter!
The National Service Ride Project’s main platform consists of local public events that any community can organize. Veterans of many kinds come to schools on their motorcycles to set off interactive sessions to help local youth understand the meaning and value of service, and how people best help themselves by helping others. Then service organizations show them the many pathways to service learning.
The project created and refined this platform at a number of proof-of-concept events in 2016. Adaptable and flexible to the needs and capacities of all involved, these events are either stand-alone events or part of related school or community initiatives.
They connect schools, motorcycle clubs, and service organizations, extending their own platforms and initiatives and reaching youth in a way none could do alone. Schools benefit from a scalable platform to encourage and enable service learning – the educational outcomes being a better cohort of citizens and better-qualified sources of labor. Local communities can strengthen to combat many costly social problems through generational partnering in a bottom-up process of change and empowerment. And veterans can impact their communities in a more direct and meaningful way.
These normally hour-long events involve:
To find out more, send us an email to nationalserviceride@gmail.com
Copyright © 2024, The National Service Ride Project. All Rights Reserved.
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