Jacob Mars, 13, recently bridged decades to a lifetime of experience when he signed up as a teen volunteer in the Young Lion of Judah program offered by the Greater Miami Jewish Federation.

The program, in partnership with the Holocaust Memorial on Miami Beach, is designed for Bar- and Bat Mitzvah-aged students who are paired with a Holocaust survivor whom they visit and befriend and help with various activities.

Jacob and his mom, Ariela, along with some other teen volunteers, first visited with survivor Joe Sachs of Sunny Isles Beach last fall.

Sachs, 85, said he was 13 when World War II broke out, the same age as Jacob, and he survived the Holocaust after the Nazis invaded his Poland home. The Young Lion of Judah program is mutually beneficial for both the young and the senior, he believes.

“To me it is very rewarding that we can explain to the youngsters about the brutality of one human to another,” Sachs said. “The whole purpose of my speaking to them is I would like to see a better world. I want them to not be standing by when they see things being done to their fellow classmates. We have to start with the kids and teach them about the horrors of the Holocaust in a manner that does not evoke the hatreds and we ask them to get involved in their community.”

Scenarios such as this one play out daily in South Florida as teens line up to volunteer to help others, to gain work experience, to fulfill a 75-hour community service requirement for graduation, or to simply stave off boredom during the long summer months. Most of the volunteers have long blown past the required 75 hours. Some have accumulated as much as 800-plus and are in it because they see volunteering as a viable option.

Lori Drutz, the director of the Jewish Volunteer Program department at the Federation, recalls how one student set up Skype for a Holocaust survivor so she could communicate with her family across the sea.

“They are the last generation of young adults that will ever witness a survivor and they become a witness for them. It’s a beautiful partnership for the survivor of Jewish history.”

Hospitals, parks, museums and schools are among the organizations that bring aboard student volunteers who pitch in for a day or two a week to gain hands-on experience with real world chores. In some cases the teens are interested in a particular career so they take to these programs to gain experience.

That would be the situation for best friends Cristina Valencia, 16, and Kelly Parker, 15, both of whom are sophomores at Gulliver Preparatory School and who live in Coral Gables. Both want to be dermatologists after college. When they heard of an opportunity to work in a volunteer capacity at the Michael Fux Family Center at Miami Children’s Hospital, it was a natural fit.

The pair work in the family center scrapbooking, playing games with patients and their families, and lead groups on tours of the center, among other jobs.

“I love interacting with kids and this is a great opportunity for social skills and to really branch out and meet new people,” Kelly said.

“I want to become a dermatologist and I love children. I thought working at a hospital would open my eyes to the life of a doctor,” Cristina said.

Both work about six hours per week and have already accumulated more than 150 volunteer hours and expect to add to that total as they continue with the hospital.

Miami Children’s also proved a home for Michael Zaldivar, a 17-year-old junior at Westminster Christian who wants a career in finance. He volunteers at the hospital’s gift shop assisting the supervisor, running the register and helping customers. “I love the hospital itself and what it stands for — helping the children,” he said. “I love being a part of that and I’m pretty set on finance and that’s why I went to the hospital. The gift shop is usually not taken up by volunteers so I could use what I’m good at and what I love to do.”

Nuria Claramunt, the assistant director of the Community and Volunteer Services Department at Miami Children’s Hospital, feels that teenagers complement the hospital’s staff of 3,000 employees and 800 volunteers, 260 of which are the students volunteers. They work particularly well with the patients who are the same age or younger. Currently the hospital is at capacity for student volunteers who, with training, learn how to engage with the patients.

“We have activity arts and crafts and games so while they [patients] are in the waiting room and anxious and not feeling well they are getting distracted so by the time they see the doctor they aren’t so scared. Teens know how to relate to them,” Claramunt said.

Miami Children’s Museum on Watson Island in Miami also supplements its regular paid staff of 30 full-timers with a large roster of about 200 young volunteers throughout the year.

“Young kids look up to a teenager,” said museum CEO Deborah Spiegelman. “Having that older teen think ‘I’m cool’ is a lot more fun.” Employing the kids, including college students, fulfills the museum’s “commitment to youth development,” she said.

Nancy Diaz, 23, lives in Hialeah and attends Miami International University of Art and Design but crosses the MacArthur to volunteer about 12 hours a week at Miami Children’s Museum. “It’s a good learning opportunity I can take it with me to whatever non-profit I work with in the future,” she said.

Marcela Rodriguez, 22, a Florida International University finance and marketing student from Miami Lakes, volunteers in the museum’s marketing department and appreciates the variety of work offered to her. “One of the things I mostly like about marketing is you can’t predict what you are going to come into.”

Working with kids, and escorting Mr. Potato Head around the museum, appealed to Bradley Jean-Baptiste, 18. The Miami Country Day senior plans to attend Stanford in the fall and the museum fuels his passion for education. “I’m considering education as a possible major, this would be a great place to get hands-on experience,” he said from the museum’s office. “It’s always good to volunteer. You can open your eyes to things you wouldn’t otherwise see or immerse yourself into. It’s a learning experience for you and for everyone. It’s a win-win.”

This concept of kids helping kids proves particularly powerful with Breakthrough Miami, a non-profit educational advancement program that partners with Miami-Dade schools. The program seeks volunteers who help mentor and work with minority youth or children in under-resourced neighborhoods. So far Breakthrough Miami, founded 10 years ago at Ransom Everglades School in Coconut Grove, is working with 82 student volunteers from Ransom, Carrollton, Cushman, Miami Country Day and, in June, adds Palmer Trinity, a private Episcopal middle and high school in Palmetto Bay. The volunteers will fan out to help more than 700 students from Miami-Dade schools this summer for a six-week session.

“That’s what makes the model work, they are young and excited and create beautiful relationships with the students [who] want to learn from someone closer to their age,” said Breakthrough Miami’s executive director Alicia Rodriguez Bower. “I believe children need a positive role model, someone they know who cares for them outside of the immediate family, someone they can say to, ‘Look what I did!’”

Archdiocese schools like Monsignor Edward Pace Senior in Miami Gardens and Archbishop Curley Notre Dame just outside Little Haiti require that its students perform volunteer work as part of the 75-hour requirement but, in keeping with their teachings of service to others, many of their students more than quadruple the volunteer hours during their four years of high school. In fact, in May the Community Blood Centers of Florida honored Archbishop Curley with an award for the school with the highest percentage of participation in volunteer work, said Brother James DePiro, the school’s vice principal for academics.

About 20 percent of the students have completed 250 or more hours of community service, DePiro said. “If we want to get the kids to believe that giving back to the community is very important, it starts now.”

Ana Garcia, principal at Monsignor Pace agrees, and notes that volunteer work extends from feeding the homeless at rescue missions in Miami to clothing Haitians in their country more than a year after the earthquake.

Pace also donates money to its two sister schools in Haiti, Moulen and Peiwu, through the efforts of student volunteers.

“We are creating young men and women who care about their community and the global community,” Garcia said. “It makes me feel good that we are creating young men and women who are aware that life doesn’t revolve around them and they are here for a greater purpose.”