Harnessing the Transformative Power of Service

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 an adaptive, community-based initiative in which veteran motorcyclists roar into schools to help motivate and mobilize youth to better themselves, their community, and their country through service learning—whether at school assemblies, in social studies and health classrooms, or at volunteer fairs.

The project helps foster a self-empowering, uplifting, and unifying narrative of citizenship and service, promoting engagement and collaboration under e pluribus unum and helping pass the baton of generational leadership. As Holshek 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.” 

Home-based in New York's Hudson Valley, the project teams with the Orange County Youth Bureau, the Orange County American Legion and Legion Riders, and the Buffalo Soldiers Motorcycle Club of West Point, NY. It has recently become a member of the Orange County Chamber of Commerce.

In its interactive presentations, veterans first help students learn the what, why, and how of service to others, using role models and peer examples—how service is kindness and more what you are than what you do; how serving your community is serving your country; and, how service doesn’t require a uniform, a change of address, a good grade point average, or even money.

Service learning helps young people self-actualize and gain the self-confidence and leadership, interpersonal, teambuilding, collaborative problem-solving, and other practical skills they need no matter their pathway forward. In addition to growing social connections and networks beyond their smart phones, they can build resumes and gain valuable experience and personal references.

Adaptable to fit growing educational community service requirements, curriculum needs, and school constraints, schools like its two-punch approach to encourage young people to help themselves by helping others—whether they sit in the front or the back of the class—then steer them quickly to self-help resourcing through an online volunteer portal. Combined with related initiatives, it promotes a multiyear service-learning curriculum strategy for school districts, students and their parents.

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. Service learning also improves a greater sense of community and civilian resilience to 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.

As an offshoot to the project's core platform, the National Service Ride Project has helped initiate a program for young people to escort Vietnam-era and other veterans on Hudson Valley Honor Flight missions to see the monuments in our nation’s capital in their honor and receive a “welcome home” for which many have waited over a half-century. These "youth guardians" get a uniquely personal opportunity to understand the meaning and value of patriotism, service, and sacrifice.

For more, download the project briefing or one-pager or email us at nationalserviceride@gmail.com.