It’s that time of year again. A time to reflect on the year that has passed and to look forward to the next year. And maybe take a nap.

Here at HandsOn Network, we’re fortunate enough to have the time to relax after a year of great events and volunteer projects. Before we settle down for our long winter’s nap, we wanted to share some posts that you might have missed over the past year and invite you to tell us what you want to learn more about in the coming year. Let us know in the comments. See you next year!

• Eight Tips for Writing the Perfect Thank You Note
• Get Creative and Say Thank You to Volunteers
• Tips for Community Engagement in Rural and Urban Communities
• April Showers Will Bring May Flowers
• 10 Kid Friendly Service Projects
• Volunteering Tips for the Zombie Apocalypse
• 10 Ways to Fight Poverty in America

Today’s post reaches back into the archives for Zachary Hect’s post on how his faith supports his service. 

My entire life, I’ve walked straight past them. If they dared to approach me, I would turn my head the other way.  If they attempted to speak to me, I would pretend like I didn’t hear them. However, over the summer — this all changed. On a PANIM-BBYO program, IMPACT: DC, I finally stopped and spoke to a homeless person.

I have always held certain beliefs about homeless people, but these misconceptions were all shattered on one sunny day in a park in Washington D.C. For about half an hour I spoke with a man who was homeless. This man transcended every homeless stereotype. He was college educated, well read, and completely lucid. I soon realized that you do not need to be mentally unstable, or unintelligent to be homeless, just unlucky. It could happen to anybody, even me. This wasn’t the first community service I had ever done, nor was it the last….but it certainly was the most meaningful.

Recently I sat through a presentation by the CEO of Youth Services America. The CEO stated that my generation of teens is doing more community service than any other generation and that he couldn’t be prouder. Upon hearing this I wasn’t surprised, but I was also a little skeptical. Today teens complete hours of community service for school and to pad their college resumes. So while there is an abundance of service taking place, it isn’t always thoughtful service. I like to say this type of community service is volunteering as a means to an end.  And, while any community service is positive, this kind of service is the least meaningful. Most of the people that do this service do not put their heart into it and they rarely get anything out of their experiences.

It’s my feeling that community service needs to be completely revamped. There shouldn’t be requirements or standards.  Teens should do community service because they want to. When teens do community service they need to be inspired.

This is no easy task…. While inspiring a teen doesn’t necessarily require a large amount of work, it requires getting the teen to take a leap of faith.  Earlier when I mentioned my experience in the park, I failed to highlight what preceded it.  I didn’t just arrive; for over a week I learned about what being homeless was. PANIM was able to captivate me through education. This is why I was willing to take a leap of faith and speak to a homeless person in a park.   Community service should not be just a quick hour of volunteering with no introduction or closure. It needs to be an educational and worthwhile experience. It needs to be an experience that truly changes the way a teen think and feels.

If we are able to do this — community service will still be done, but not so a teen can graduate high school, or so they can get into college…. Community service will be done because teens will want to do it.

Zachary Hecht is a senior at Commack High School where he is a High Honor Role student and an IB Diploma candidate. Zach is on the regional board of BBYO’s Nassau-Suffolk Region. His interests include international relations and economics.

Today’s post reaches back into the archives for Saumya Haas’ post on how her faith supports her service. Saumya is Executive Director of Headwaters/Delta Interfaith.

There is no way to agree on a definition of faith. We each have our own way of understanding. The same can be said for interfaith work. There are lots of ways, and many reasons.

When it comes to faith, I’m everything and nothing: a hereditary Hindu Pujarin, a Unitarian Reverend, and Manbo Asogwe (Priestess of Vodou). I celebrate Christmas and Winter Solstice. I am a religious humanist. I believe in science. I’m not an authority on anything, but I am irrepressibly curious; I question my motives, effectiveness and reason every day. I’m also the Director of Headwaters/Delta Interfaith: this secular organization exists because of my definition of faith.

I was raised with the idea that certainty is suspect: critical assessment, empathy and debate are necessary vehicles of a faith life. These are also the qualities that advised my family’s deep commitment to interfaith outreach, spiritual education and social equity work. Of course we didn’t use those terms. It was just what we did. I went into the slums and helped. I never failed to notice that the kids I played with and helped during the day didn’t leave at the end of it. This was their real life.

Those slums taught me. I worked with Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and people who practice tribal and folk tradition, with ethnic and cultural groups whose rivalries and divisions make religious differences look like nothing. These groups were made up of sub-groups, of sub-sub-groups. Of individuals. I didn’t know I was an interfaith facilitator. I always felt I was the one learning. I still do.

Today, I live in the USA and my organization, Headwaters/Delta Interfaith, does a variety of things: we are very involved with revitalization efforts in New Orleans, where we are opening a non-denominational Spiritual Space as part of the innovative New Orleans Healing Center. We work with Hindu American Seva Charities to unite Hindu communities across the USA in social service outreach projects, and assist the Pluralism Project at Harvard University with documenting faith diversity.  We also provide Social Media advice to other organizations and facilitate events that bring people together in mutual respect and curiosity. We still help the diverse populations in Indian slums by supporting the work of , the organization my parents started, where I discovered what faith, and interfaith could mean.

I learned that if you want to help people, you have to realize that they have a real life, not a life that you imagine or superimpose due to their faith/ethnicity/whatever. They are whole. Our burden is not to help them, but to unburden ourselves of certainty. Both faith and interfaith work require a struggle with our own egos. When I walk into a meeting, a slum, a church, a classroom, I have to remind myself: these people know more than I do. They are authorities on their own lives. I am an authority on mine. That is all.

I struggle with my attachment to results: I want to see the manifestation of my work. Changing societies is the tedious work of generations, of ages. It is happening all the time, but we don’t know how our own contribution will turn out. We can see our failures but it’s never given to us to know what we averted. We cannot measure the impact of things that do not happen: the lives saved, the neighborhoods preserved, the connections that caught and held the world together. We only notice the violence and the loss. The gain is invisibly hidden in the everyday. The proof of its existence is that there is nothing to see. I’m not talking about God; I’m talking about goodness. I’m talking about us.

As an expression of my faith, interfaith work becomes my faith.

I have questions about God that may never be answered, but I’m certain that other people are as real as I am. If God is real he/she/it is encoded by the reality I can see: it is that reality that I engage with. If God is within, then my urge to engage, to speak out against injustice, is also God. But in the end, my faith is most deeply in my fellow humans: in the wisdom of our combined cultures, unique heritage and the spark that gives us curiosity and compassion.

We each might have our own answer, but we seek them together.

Saumya Arya Haas, Executive Director of Headwaters/Delta Interfaith, advises local, national and international inter/faith and social equity organizations. She is a Hindu Pujarin, Unitarian Reverend and Manbo Asogwe (Priestess of Vodou); she blogs about religion at The Huffington Post and around the web. 

Volunteering and helping our fellow man has long been seen as an altruistic thing to do. But more selfish motives–pleasing friends, doing what you want–are more successful causes of effective volunteering! Regardless of motive, volunteering improves the health, happiness, and in some cases, the longevity of volunteers. Children who volunteer are more likely to grow up to be adults who volunteer. Even unwilling children who are forced to volunteer fare better than kids who don’t volunteer. Communities with lots of volunteers are more stable and better places to live, which in turn further boosts volunteerism.

“On one hand, it’s striking that volunteering even occurs,” says Mark Snyder, a psychologist and head of the Center for the Study of the Individual and Society at the University of Minnesota. “It seems to run against the strong dynamics of self-interest. There is simply nothing in society that says that someone is mandated to help anyone else.” Yet 1 in 3 adults do meaningful volunteer work on a sustained basis, he notes, and the United States has one of the world’s highest rates of volunteerism.

“People who volunteer tend to have higher self-esteem, psychological well-being, and happiness,” Snyder says. “All of these things go up as their feelings of social connectedness goes up, which in reality, it does. It also improves their health and even their longevity.”

Among teenagers, even at-risk children, who volunteer reap big benefits, according to research findings studied by Jane Allyn Piliavin, a retired University of Wisconsin sociologist. She cites a positive effect on grades, self-concept, and attitudes toward education. Volunteering also led to reduced drug use and huge declines in dropout rates and teen pregnancies.

Most people say they value volunteering because it’s “the right thing to do,” among other altruistic reasons. But the strongest drivers of successful volunteers are actually more self-focused. There are five main reasons people volunteer:

Understanding: the desire to learn new things and acquire knowledge.

Esteem enhancement: feeling better about yourself and finding greater stability in life.

Personal development: acquiring new skills, testing your capabilities, and stretching yourself.

Sense of community: making the world, or your piece of it, a better place.

Humanitarian values: serving and helping others, often with a strong religious component.

People often get into volunteer work because a friend asks them, and that can be a fine entry point. But people should also do some work to make sure the organization is a good fit for their interests and that the work they would be doing is also a good fit. Be sure to ask “what’s the optimal match for me?”

Further, if there is a jumble of factors motivating people to consider volunteering, they might want to reconsider. When people have multiple motivations, it is harder for them to be satisfied. Experts say it is easier to derive happiness when your goals are simpler.

Concern for others and concern for yourself can complement one another. Find a way to do good for others at the same time as you do good for yourself. Have you made volunteering a part of your social life? Let us know how in the comments below!

When you’re looking for a job, your resume is going to be how an employer first gets to know you. Of course you want to include the work experience and education that makes you qualified for a job, but should you include your experience volunteering?

Yes.

Listing volunteer work on your resume also can add a lot of valuable information to your job history, especially for new job seekers or recent graduates with short resumes. Volunteer positions can fill gaps in employment – so for students whose employment history is short, volunteer work can be an especially important addition to your resume.

How do you include information about volunteering on your resume?

There is no ‘right’ way to write a resume, so there is no right way to include information about volunteering on a resume.

Where do I include volunteer experience?

If you’re just out of school and you don’t have a lot of work experience, it’s okay to include volunteering along with paid work. Be prepared to answer questions about your volunteer work and how it helped to make you qualified for the job. It’s important to describe the volunteer experience in a way that shows how what you’ve learned while volunteering applies to the job you’re applying for.

If you have a longer work history, you can have a different section for your volunteer experience. Be sure to include information about the volunteer position that is relevant to the paid position that you’re applying for.

What if the volunteer position title was just “volunteer?”

Including “volunteer” on your resume may be accurate, but it might leave questions from your potential employer. Think about the work that you did while volunteering and talk to your volunteer supervisor to see if there’s a more appropriate title for the work that you did.

How should I describe the volunteer work that I did?

Describe the volunteer work in terms of what you achieved. Highlight the skills that you learned while volunteering.

Did you raise a lot of money? Did you manage a budget or accomplish goals on schedule? Did you supervise a staff of people? Even if they were volunteers too, your success required the ability to be a motivating leader.

If you are a student seeking your first job after school, being able to show volunteer work on a resume demonstrates that you had interests beyond the classroom. If you are returning to the paid work force after some time away, your volunteer activities can show that you kept yourself sharp and involved. If you want to change career fields, it may be your volunteer work in the new field that tells a prospective employer you’re worth the risk, even if all your paid employment history is in some other field.

Have you included your volunteer work on your resume? Did it help you to get a job? Tell us about it in the comments!

It’s that time of year again, the annual office holiday parties! Great, a day full of awkward socializing, lots of food, and buying presents for people you don’t know very well. What could be better, right? Using this time to volunteer as an office instead of spending awkward quality time together!

“How can this happen?” you may be wondering. By turning your Secret Santa gifts into service donations!

“Whoopee! Wait now what? How do I actually do this in my office?”

Easy, tell employees to bring a toy that they think the employee whose name they drew would have liked as a kid. For example, bring in a football for that jock in your office, a Barbie doll for the fashionista, or a game of chess for the deep thinker. Once the gifts are exchanged, donate them to children in need! Not only does your office get to have a good laugh about the toys that they get, children also get to have an awesome Christmas thanks to your office donations!

Volunteering and donating to your office’s favorite charities is a great way to make a solid bond between co-workers. Want some more ideas to keep this holiday spirit of giving up around your office? Look, we’ve got more!

• Volunteer for your co-workers favorite organizations or causes: Send around an email asking co-workers to share where they like to volunteer or what they are passionate about. Make these ideas into a day of employee service. Choose a place close to the office and try to get all staff members to attend. Try closing the office that day so that your co-workers can reflect on the experience together. Nothing spells teamwork like volunteering as a team!
• Make toys or decorations for your community members: Is there a retirement community in your area? A children or family shelter? They would love help with Christmas celebrations this year! Make cards or pictures so that they can decorate their walls with lots of holiday chair. Make toys or assemble toys for families or children in need so that they can have an unforgettable Christmas! It is a great way to spark conversation among employees that will focus on something besides the stresses of work.
• Make a donation to your company’s favorite cause: Do you have spare change laying around your desk or in your pocket? Great donate it to those who need it more than your desk surface! Vote on a charity to make donations to and pass around a collection bucket to your employees at the Christmas party. After donations are received recruit employees to personally donate the money to the designated charity. Who knows, they may like this idea so much that it will become an office tradition?
• Pick an ornament, give a gift: Put up a Christmas tree in the office with names and ages of children or families who may be struggling this holiday season. Get in contact with your local shelters to see who will sponsor this project. Employees can grab a name, buy and wrap a present to put back under the tree. The presents will then get donated to the needy families. Not only will families get a better Christmas thanks to your company’s presents, but also your office will be decorated with the tree and Christmas presents.

Volunteering is a great way to bring employees together because it is a way to collaborate on something other than work. When all employees feel passionate about the activity they are doing they can build a more effective team.

Sounds better than your awkward office Secret Santa event or tacky sweater party? Great! Give back this holiday season, and build a more effective work team through volunteering!

Today’s post came from Calla Gilson and originally appeared on the Huffington Post on November 24, 2012.

Year after year it seemed to be the same old routine: after finishing the dishes from Thanksgiving dinner, my extended family members would each draw a name for the quickly approaching Christmas gift exchange. For weeks, each person puzzled over what would suit the recipient they had drawn, until finally Christmas arrived and countless soy candles, cookbooks and remote-controlled airplanes were swapped. The unfulfilling ritual seemed pointless, but continued habitually without a second thought until the year my cousin came up with a dire request to help her church’s food pantry that had been running dangerously low that winter. With one simple suggestion, a new tradition was born.

Now, each Christmas, individual families are asked to bring bags of groceries to our Christmas dinner. After the tables are cleared from the feast we enjoy, they are covered with groceries which we then sort and divide among the churches that my family members attend in two different towns. Later in the day, the supplies are delivered and shelved by our able hands, and sit waiting to make a difference in the lives of those who are of need in our community.

The holidays arrive in a whirlwind of tradition and time-consuming events. Yet, no tradition is truly as extraordinary as one that benefits others. There are countless ways to gain family participation in any number of service activities. I have long admired the involvement of my best friend’s family that cooks Thanksgiving dinner for any member of the community that is in want or need of a hot meal on Thanksgiving Day. Raised in this tradition, she has greatly benefitted from experiencing the interaction with guests, and serving those who would normally be overlooked with the festivities of the holiday underway. In any way a family can, it should involve every member in service. While the holidays are not the only time that a family joins together in service, each holiday brings with it wonderful junctures to form any number of traditions of service. Especially where the outreach of many food banks and clothes closets are concerned, the holidays bring with them an escalated need for supplies, often experiencing bare shelves after the tree has been taken down and ill-fitting gifts exchanged at the store.

The season of giving provides an excellent opportunity for kids of any age to make a difference and spread joy within their communities. One way to make an impact is to share your service work with others to inspire more people to get involved. For example, generationOn, the youth enterprise of Points of Light, in partnership with Hasbro, is presenting all young people with the opportunity to be a Joy Maker this holiday season. From November 19 – December 18, for each act of service shared by a young person during the holidays, Hasbro will donate one toy to Toys for Tots – up to 100,000 toys. To be a Joy Maker and share your service story visit www.generationOn.org.

Regardless of how you choose to give back, this time of year provides a wealth of opportunity and when planning a service project, below are some simple tips to consider — S.E.R.V.E:

Seek out activities in your area that have already been organized! There are so many great ways to get involved with local community outreach organizations — especially around the holidays. Do you live near an orchard? Perhaps a gleaning day collecting food for your local food bank is already an annual event. Watch news sources for opportunities to lend a hand, and once you become involved, the great networking of the service community will open doors to opportunities all around you.

Early involvement in service leads to a lifetime of caring for others. Personally, my interest in service was lovingly fostered by the support of my family and church community. A love for service and helping others is one of the greatest values parents can instill in their children. Equipping children with the ability to empathize and the problem-solving perspective of addressing issues within the community provides priceless life skills that allow them to better understand their world and leads to opportunities for exploration and learning like no other activity.

Record the work that you do together! Some of my favorite memories were created while helping others. Document the service that you do as a family. Make a scrapbook together, keep a journal, preserve your memories and share them with others! With today’s technology, blogging has become a great way to not only document experiences, but to share them with others and provide the world with inspiration.

Vacation time is helping time! Look for ways to combine fun and relaxation while lending a helping hand. Even though the kids have the day “off” school, why not make holidays such as MLK day a day “on” by helping at a local soup kitchen, or visiting the residents of your local nursing home? Joining together with other families is even a great way to get involved. Together with their peers, children can explore how to make their mark on the world within the safe confines of their families.

And finally, remember-Effective, not extensive. Something doesn’t have to be large-scale in order to make a difference! Utilize any opportunity to be of service to others! Do you know of people who are unable to leave their homes in your community? Why not take them a plate from your Thanksgiving meal? Look for ways in which to center the focus on others.

Phillips Brooks worded the essential quality of family service well when he said, “Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.” The truth of this quote cannot be denied. While today, charity seems to have come to possess a connotation of some sort of financial outpouring, this could not be farther from the reality of the measure. Perhaps the best synonym for charity is love. In this respect, any action done to demonstrate the love that a family has for each other, projected outwards to others is without question an act of great importance. And, while the impact made in the lives of others may be immense, the reward of family service is immeasurably abundant in return. The unity that is wrought from selfless giving, coupled with memories that last far beyond the scent of any soy candle or battery life of remote controlled airplane combine to form a priceless bond. This year, talk with your family to discover what issues each member is passionate about. Address a need, and show your community the immensity of love that your family possesses. Take the steps toward a tradition that makes a difference.

The holidays are an important time of year for the nonprofit community. Organizations both large and small rely heavily upon income generated during this brief window to sustain their programs throughout the year.

Knowing this fact well, many organizations are on the lookout for innovative ways they can increase holiday fundraising results each year. At StayClassy, they’ve found that peer-to-peer fundraising spikes dramatically in December. Check out the great graphic they’ve produced that details some of the unique benefits of using peer-to-peer fundraising during the holidays.

But what if you’ve already got an end of the year appeal scheduled? Or an email campaign that’s going to launch? Won’t your donors be fatigued if you try to launch a p2p campaign too?

Honestly, they might be.

The truth is there’s no one size-fits-all solution when it comes to making the most of the Holiday period. If you’ve already got a bunch of fundraising activities lined up for your existing donors, then launching a p2p campaign on top of everything else might be overkill.

That being said, there’s still a simple way that any organization can use peer-to-peer to improve its holiday fundraising results…without fatiguing donors.

Leveraging Your Core Supporters

The best way to reap the benefits of p2p fundraising this Holiday Season while avoiding donor fatigue is to limit the pool of fundraisers you recruit to just your core supporters.

Your core supporters are people like board or staff members and your most passionate volunteers. When you ask your core supporters to fundraise, you focus on the people most likely to say yes and you spare the rest of your list the feelings of fatigue that come with excessive asks.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to have an army of fundraisers to benefit from peer-to-peer fundraising. We’ve found that the average active fundraiser (one that raises at least one dollar) brings in about $568 dollars. That eclipses the average online donation, which is anywhere from $60 to $90. Each active fundraiser also brings in seven donors and over half of those donors will be new to the organization. That makes p2p more than an effective fundraising method; it makes it a great tool for donor acquisition too.

The bottom line is that getting your core supporters fundraising during December can help your organization raise more money and acquire more new donors this Holiday Season.

How to Organize a Mini-P2P Campaign

The simplest campaign theme you can pitch to your supporters is to “give up some gifts” this Holiday Season. Charity:water has famously used this model to get its supporters to donate their birthdays to the cause. Supporters are asked to create fundraising pages for their birthdays; then they share those pages with friends and family, and ask for donations to charity:water instead of presents.

The same theme can easily be adapted for the Holidays. It’s as simple as setting up a campaign, adding in some default text, and then reaching out to your core supporters to get involved. One thing to keep in mind, even though the fundraising will take place online, your outreach doesn’t have to. If you want to get as many of your core supporters involved as possible, you should ask them personally.

Make a list of the people you want to get involved ahead of time and give them a call. Let people know they are being asked because of their special status in the organization. Even better, define the goal that this group of the organization’s closest supporters is looking to achieve collectively this Holiday season. It could be raising enough money to launch a new pilot program, open a new school, or any other worthwhile goal. By framing the ask as exclusive and important (both true things) you’ll send the right signals to prospective fundraisers and get more people involved.

Even if you only have a handful of people in your mini-campaign, don’t lose heart. We’ve seen some power fundraisers raise over $10,000 all on their own. By relying on your closest supporters for your Holiday campaign, you may get less people involved, but the ones you do will be more passionate. That means they’ll be more likely to go above and beyond!

To learn more about using social fundraising to boost Holiday results check out the infographic and join StayClassy for their upcoming webinar on last minute holiday fundraising.