In Canada, National Volunteer Week is the week of April 14th – April 20th. It is a week that acknowledges the work and commitment of volunteers around Canada. As a personal observation, within the week, special gifts, parties and events are being held to celebrate another year of volunteering. From people that they volunteered for, it is clear that most people are grateful for having volunteers. To celebrate National Volunteer Week, here are 5 benefits to volunteering. Hopefully, these can help you build your appreciations for volunteers and/or become a volunteer yourself.
1. Volunteering is a meaningful experience
At first glance, this is hopefully one of the first things that comes to your mind when someone mentions volunteering. A simple process: you donate time to help communities and/or organizations grow. However, despite how simple volunteering is, it can leave an amazing long-lasting impact. As you help people out, a possible result is that people will like you. By committing a small bit into volunteering, can come back as a very meaningful experience. Volunteering is not entirely about helping others, but it’s to also allow volunteers themselves to grow and adapt to many new situations. From this, many amazing memories can be created and those memories can make volunteering a meaningful experience for all individuals.
2. Volunteering helps with mental health
There are a wide variety of volunteer experiences to try from writing thank you letters to the frontline workers, interacting with seniors and/or kids, to helping out in big festivals. As a thought, without experiencing new things like these, life would seem pretty boring. Without having to learn new things, meet great people, or see new places, it would be hard to cope with mental health, and individuals can often feel unhappy when they do not experience new things.
Through volunteering, there is the benefit that it helps with your mental health. You are able to learn new things, meet incredible people, and discover new places.
Image by Bob Dmyt from Pixabay
3. Volunteer helps you build skills
Through volunteering, you can learn many skills that you wouldn’t normally learn. For example, in some volunteer projects, you may be tasked with kitchen duties (for the cause of serving homeless people and/or a community). Depending on what the volunteer project is, it is very likely that you will learn new skills. Ranging from social skills, life skills, customer service skills, etc… there’s always something new for you to learn, especially through volunteering. On top of learning skills, recall that there are a variety of volunteer experiences. Many experiences helps you learn many skills which would become essential to you in one way or more.
As a fun fact, volunteer experiences can be used to help you achieve post-secondary and/or jobs. As mentioned earlier, volunteering can help you learn new things. While most jobs are more focussed on your experience of working with other people, there are always other things that can help you gain an advantage because of volunteering. These other things can include problem-solving, time-management, reflections. Volunteering not only helps you build skills, but also allows you to utilize your existing skills and make them better!
4. Volunteering helps you get out of your comfort zone
Even if you are shy, volunteering helps you get out of your shell. At some point, through volunteering (but also through any sort of participation), your comfort zone begins to grow. By experiencing and participating in new things, volunteering can help you build confidence in not just yourself, but also to other people and communities. While it may seem difficult to get out of your comfort zone, it is always possible. All it takes is to participate as best as you can!
As a personal example, I remember my first time volunteering. I had no idea exactly what to expect and was ready to follow what I was told. However, as my first experience progressed, I quickly became comfortable being around other volunteers, and after other experiences, I became comfortable interacting with the community. It is through my participation in icebreaker games (where we introduce ourselves and interact with other volunteers) and enjoying volunteering in general that helped me expand my comfort zone and be more confident.
– “Ice breaker”
5. Volunteering enlightens how you view the world
Now, this last one might be difficult to understand at first if you’re not used to volunteering. However, by experiencing many new experiences, volunteers can be prone to changing some of their perspectives. As a personal observation, through volunteering, the most common perspectives that changes are towards how volunteers see homeless people, seniors, and other commonly stereotyped groups of people. With the previous benefits of volunteering mentioned here, these enlightenments happen at some point for volunteers. Through a meaningful experience where you’re able to go outside your comfort zone, there’s the possibility that your perspective of the world and how it operates changes.
Closing Statement
Before you leave, a few things to keep in mind. Firstly, these 5 benefits of volunteering mentioned are not all of the possible benefits. Second, while this is briefly mentioned, it takes some commitment to achieve most of the benefits (as a question to think about: if you don’t engage in the opportunity, then how can you benefit greatly from it?) Lastly, while this is also briefly mentioned, volunteering is much more fun with friends. Even if you started it by yourself, meeting new people and making new friends during a volunteer opportunity is where the main fun of volunteering begins.
Hopefully, this blog post has enhanced your appreciation for volunteers around the world. While most volunteer opportunities are short, every last contribution goes a long way to those that the volunteers helped. Through volunteering, there is so much potential that can be fulfilled and many ways to build yourself. Personally, volunteering is a very positive experience for me and I am glad to present a blog post on this. Hopefully, this post encourages you to become a volunteer whenever a volunteering opportunity presents itself. Have a great rest of your day and Happy National Volunteer Week!
Images: 1 (Featured Image) , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12