TURN YOUR PASSION INTO VOLUNTEER WORK
Passion is any compelling emotion or feeling, such as love or hate. It's the fuel in the fire of action.
What's Volunteering?
Volunteering provides help or service to a person or organization for no financial gain. The person who offers their time is a volunteer. If you have a passion for volunteering, it means you have the drive, zeal, and willingness to serve people without expecting any financial gain from them.
How then can you turn this passion into volunteering? Look at how you can put smiles on people's faces below.
1. Clean Up Your Neighborhood.
You can make it a duty to pack dirt or refuse in your neighborhood regularly to keep the environment clean and healthy enough for living. You can also gather people that fall within or without your age grade and influence them positively to keep the environment clean always. Enlighten the people about ways of refuse disposal-by burning, making compost for farmlands, burying, recycling through government and private agencies, e.t.c, and their importance.
2. Help Your Neighbors
People face silent battles daily; you could be a source of encouragement to those living within your neighborhood. You could run errands for them, get groceries, take their pets on a walk, babysit their kids, visit, wish, and always encourage them well.
3. Donate Stuff
There are more ways to help the community than just contributing your time or money. You could be helping someone in need even by donating your unwanted possessions.
Consider donating unwanted items like your pretty used clothes, shoes, bags, socks, bicycles, books e.t.c o charity shops, or contributing unused food to a food bank instead of wasting it. You could also think of starting your own fairly used collection at your school, church, business, or community.
4. Money Donations
Once in a while, you can donate to orphanages, outreaches, campaigns, healthcare in rural areas, disaster relief, religious organizations, community services, older adults' homes, refugee camps, and places that may need financial, emotional, mental, and psychological assistance.
5. Volunteering at NGOs
Serve at an NGO in your community, country, or remotely. Render services wholeheartedly and be concerned about making an impact. Various organizations need the services of Volunteers, so take the opportunity to be part of something worthwhile. There are NGOs for children, youths, women, men, and climate action, or you could choose NGOs to volunteer at according to the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs). Managing the social media accounts of charities to raise awareness, Writing blog posts for non-profit organizations, Doing photography or pe, and performing a musical instrument at a children's home are ways of volunteering at an NGO.
You can advance your professional career by choosing an online opportunity that matches your skills. It is also a great way to prove your communication skills, as most communication is done through emails. Visit websites such as AllForGood and VolunteerMatch to find online volunteer opportunities.
6. During elections
You can serve your country by volunteering to help people register to vote or locate their polling units to encourage citizen participation in a country's electoral activities, thereby exercising their civic and political rights.
7. Volunteering in disaster-affected areas
Some places experience natural disasters like tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires e.t.c which may cause loss of lives and properties. They need any available help they can get to salvage the situation. You can be an advocate that can influence NGOs and government agencies to intervene and help them recover properties before settling down in another environment.
Benefits of Volunteering
There are countless benefits you get from volunteering, and some of them include:
1. Connects You to Others
By committing to a shared goal, vision, or activity, you get the opportunity to meet other people and make new friends. This is especially useful if you are new to an area or training.
Volunteering with other people will also help you to improve your social skills. While some people are naturally outgoing, others may be shy, so activities with others will allow them to develop their social skills.
It also helps strengthen an existing relationship with a friend you volunteered alongside in an event.
2. It makes You Energized and Happy
Social contact with others while volunteering can relieve stress and put you in a good mood. Being in a social setting can help fight and evade feelings of loneliness and depression.
You will start to feel a sense of achievement and satisfaction as you do good for and to people far from you. This will help to improve your self-confidence and sense of belonging. Also, the time you spend volunteering will help you take your mind off your worries.
For many retired people, volunteer work can provide a sense of purpose. However, this sense of purpose can exist for volunteers at any age, especially once they see the results of the good they are doing.
Volunteering can help you develop your thinking skills and keep you physically active. For older volunteers, the physical aspects of volunteering help them to cope with everyday tasks and avoid issues such as high blood pressure and heart disease.
3. Boosts Your Career
Doing volunteer work can help you to acquire skills that you can use in your profession. An example would be learning how to cope with a crisis by working at a refugee camp or disaster site.
In turn, you can also apply your job skills when volunteering. It also boosts your resumé/CV and gives you an edge over others.
4. It’s Fun to volunteer
By volunteering in an area that is meaningful to you, you can enjoy yourself while making a difference at the same time. You get to be happy, learn new things and make new friends who love Volunteering like you.
There are so many ways to volunteer and the benefits of volunteering. You can search for more opportunities on the internet to see exciting opportunities you can venture into. The world needs the help of people like you. Make a difference today.
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