What are you good at doing? Is there anything that you think you might like to do? Volunteering is a great place to show off what you are good at or you can use volunteering to broaden your horizons in different types of work or things you never thought you would like. There is several different kinds of volunteering such as building homes, cleaning up roads, hospice or local volunteer needs listed by your local government. With all the types of volunteering needs you are sure to find something the suites your gifts and wants somewhere. All sorts of people and organizations need you volunteer time in order to make things happen for the less fortunate or just in order to keep the place around your clean and livable.
Lets start by thinking of what you are good at or what skills you would like to experience with. Are you good at using your hands, paperwork, research, listening, public speaking? Are you observant, do you like the outdoors? Are you strong headed and goal oriented to where you would achieve a task that most people would refuse to do? See, there are all types of volunteering opportunities to suite your skills and wants. People who need volunteering most of the time just want someone who is open-minded and willing to learn something new.
So you figured out what you are good at and what things might interest you. But where do you find these so called volunteering opportunities? The internet or your City Hall is the first two places to look. For me it was a little daunting because there are so many people who need peoples help. I wished that one person would just say we need you, so come do this. But after a month of thinking about what I would like to do I researched it a little bit harder on the internet by going to
craigslist.org,
meetup.com, and my City Hall website. I found a person who needed me and was eager to get me started!
Volunteering was not as easy as I thought, not the volunteering part, but being set up to volunteer. There are a lot of small volunteering acts you can do but I wanted my hours to count so I could put it on my resume. Sometimes you have to go through training and you have to do paper work if you want your hours to be accounted for. There is volunteering you can do by just saying that are going to help and show up, I found this type of volunteering through Random Acts of Kindness. I found that Hospice is my volunteer calling, it is not something a lot of people could see themselves doing and is one of the mentally challenging volunteering opportunities you can find. So when finding what type of volunteering you would like to do remember that training and paperwork may be needed.
A lot of people don’t see the rewards of being a volunteer, but there are plenty! It may be that helping people or your environment makes you feel like you did something good and therefore makes you happy. It could be that you would like to learn something new and you personally and professionally may excel because of your new skills. The people you meet volunteering is just incredible! There are so many different types of people who are hit with the “volunteer bug” and continue doing it. People who at first glance would not even imagine it. Volunteering can lighten you spiritually, everybody is always off doing their own thing and it seems that nobody really cares for anybody but themselves, but you see the teamwork and compassion of all types of people and it makes living with others a little bit stress free because you now know that you are not that only one who cares. Volunteering can also help you with going to a better school or getting a better job that you normally would not have received. As you see there are all kinds of rewards to volunteering and the rewards are great!
Hopefully there is not much holding you back from doing what you want to do. I know that there may be some hurdles that you may have to overcome, but it is totally worth it. Come be a part of the thousands who volunteer! See you out there!
