How Community Outreach Started on Your Team?

[Donut]

I was reading through this thread discussing the benefits in submitting for a Chairman's award (and in doing the work behind being able to submit), and it got me wondering about the motivation behind community outreach in general for teams. In my 10 years of FRC neither team I've been with has done a ton of community outreach, and definitely not to a level to even think about submitting a Chairman's award. We've only done a few things here and there, and when we have it's almost always been for personal benefit (built a t-shirt shooter for student recruiting purposes, presentations at sponsors in the hopes of more funding) or because someone externally asked us to (new FLL teacher asked us for help with their team, FTC event coordinator asked if we could demo an FRC robot at their event).

I've done FRC for 10 years and am a product of the system, so my own experience is most of my motivation for being involved and trying to spread the message about it. I want to ask what else motivates teams and individuals to do community outreach, and how do you go about motivating others as well? Is the motivation for personal benefit (i.e. we started an off season event because we got sick of only getting to compete at one regional)? Outside requests? Indebtedness to the program? A warm fuzzy feeling inside?

I'm especially interested in how teams started doing outreach outside of FIRST (like Habitat for Humanity, Relay for Life, etc.). Did someone on the team have a personal tie to a cause? Was there a mandatory requirement for volunteering on the team? I notice of a lot of team volunteering seems to be done in the "off season". How did you convince other team members that it was worth their time to have the team volunteer, rather than "taking a break" in the fall/summer for other activities? Note that I'm not saying "taking a break" is a bad thing, I like having a life and interests outside of FIRST as well. I'm just curious as to what drove others to get out into their communities and to take FIRST from a seasonal sport to a year round activity.