Community Service: It Helps More Than Your Community

By Sebastian Troup


Community service is that "feel good" activity that many want to accomplish, but don't always make the time for. With everyone so busy with family and work, it is sometimes tough to make volunteering a priority. Here are several reasons why volunteering is more than just an opportunity to feel good about yourself and is actually a valuable use of your time.

Community service greatly affects your community, and this is a very common fact. Why not take a few parts of you time to make the community a better place to live in? Volunteering a few hours a month can make a huge difference even with a small amount of time that is invested. Events such as park and street cleanups, local school projects, serving food at a shelter or working at your local food pantry, helping with youth activities, and more are some of the volunteering activities today. Even if you just have an hour each week to give, this truly makes a big impact.

You'll become an example yourself when you do volunteering. Volunteering not only affects the greater community, but also directly impacts your family and friends. If you have kids, it becomes a great building block in teaching and mentoring them. If possible, find volunteer opportunities that encourage kids to participate so that you they can volunteer and help also. This will mold them to see that giving back is not only the right thing to do, but assisting others and the environment is a great investment for the years to come. This is also a nice chance to call you friends and invite them to participate by creating group volunteer events which can make an even bigger impact. The ever so popular social media makes it quite easy to organize group volunteering that can spread quite fast across the networks and as a result, will create a positive feedback not only on the volunteer experience and organization but also for you and your friends.

Depending on your schedule, several companies today are offering some workplace volunteer programs that allow their employees to spend a certain amount of hours per month that are approved during work hours. Why not spend such time to the community for the better good? The company is paying you for such tasks which make it advantageous for your family and friends to partake in such events to make to the most use of their time. If your company is not offering such volunteer program, then you might want to inquire about it from your management to help you get started.

The benefits of volunteerism are too many to mention though most of them enhance your skills and help you gain more experience. This by far, is one of the most noteworthy reasons to volunteer that others may not realize yet. Volunteering terms such as "micro-volunteering" are becoming well known simply because companies, volunteers and organizations all benefit greatly from this concept. What it all boils down to is that micro-volunteering allows employees to dedicate small amounts of time to a cause and also donate time that utilizes and enhances their current set of skills.

For instance, there are many nonprofits that don't have in-house web designers. There is a constant need for web designers and if you are a web designer yourself, you are in high demand. You can give a huge impact to the community by spending a few hours of your time in volunteering for couple of weeks and sharing your insights and skills to an organization. You can hone your skills and gain additional experience while at the same time the organization can benefit greatly from it. This is a great opportunity for freelance web designers to do some professional work that could lead to a long-term career and contract with the organization once they see how well you do volunteering.




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