Both are true:
1) You are making a positive impact on someone's life if they are struggling with material that you hopefully can make easier to understand.
2) You are engaged in an activity that practically every premed applicant has done for a few hundred hours. And you will likely continue to do some form of tutoring/mentoring to underserved or disadvantaged students or adults when you are in medical school or are a professional.
OP: You are mixing the two thoughts, which, when looked through an "admissions lens," have two different meanings.
I explain that you can (and will likely) get credit for serving those with special needs in this article:
The Greatest Common Factor (GCF) between two numbers is the largest positive integer that can divide both numbers evenly (without remainders). Prime
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I also explain that under the competency model (see-do-teach), teaching is more a demonstration of an academic competency than service orientation.
Over a decade ago, I wrote a series of articles (here is Part 1) that heralded the growing importance of understanding “competency.” Over the last decade,
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Yes, some of us will give you some credit if this is part of your non-clinical volunteering portfolio, but I have been in many file discussions where this isn't enough to break a tie with someone else who has other non-clinical activities that are not involved with teaching/tutoring unless they were fully employed as teachers and have to contend with IEP's and other state-imposed standards/financial constraints.
Of course, you are not in the position to say, "the hell what the adcom thinks, this is a non-clinical activity." It really depends on who the louder voices are in an adcom deliberation and how we can give you credit.
I make this point: if you worked in the university learning services office to read textbooks out to a recording device so some child patient who has auditory processing challenges or reading challenges can better keep up with a school lesson/lecture... would you categorize it as a non-clinical activity or being a teaching assistant? Would it be clinical if you read the textbook to the student at the bedside? At some point, the screening rubric must render consistent results, and for me, it has always been easy to separate VERB from OBJECT. You are teaching/tutoring (academic competency) for a student with special needs (bonus points?).
Others are free to differ. That's why we have committees. And that's why you need to be careful that not every activity can be black-and-white except for the lens you wish to view it through... in this case, the screening rubric versus your altruism.
