“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a civil rights leader whose actions sparked a national movement. The 13 years he dedicated to civil rights activities ignited concern and conscience within our country’s citizens. His courage and selfless devotion were undeniable, and for this his legacy continues to inspire Points of Light and volunteers around the world.

January is awesome! Why is January awesome?! Because January is Poverty in America Awareness Month. While poverty has plagued our society for decades, attention should be given to the poverty rate increase from 13.2% in 2008 to 14.3% in 2009-the biggest statistical increase since 2004. Similarly, according to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, between 2000 and 2008, the number of poor Americans grew by more than nine million. Now that you have been inspired to fight poverty in America, we have ten ways to fight poverty in your community and throughout America:

1. Support a local or family-owned business. Small businesses keep communities together, while also pumping money back into the community and ultimately fighting poverty. These small businesses also often have interesting or unique items, which is always a bonus. 
2. Plan a vacation around a learning or helping experience. Vacations are always fun; however, consider the communities around your vacation destination and the potential poverty within those neighborhoods. Take a few hours out of your day while you’re on vacation and volunteer.
3. Donate to your local food bank. Hunger is a year-round issue, and forces people to choose between food and other expenses.
4. Shop for good. Choose stores or services that support local groups. Buy local, it can be better for your health and wallet.
5. Organize a food drive in your community. A food drive will provide a family food, while also bringing your community together and hopefully motivate other community to do more to fight poverty.
6. Do a fundraiser! Plan a walk-a-thon, yard sale, lemonade stand, or benefit concert to raise money for a local organization. Why not have fun with your fundraiser while supporting a good cause?! These activities will surely be exciting and worthwhile!
7. Research! Become aware of local policies and programs that affect low-income families. Find out where poverty is focused in your city, how widespread the poverty stricken areas are, and how you can help. 
8. Share your research! Voice your concern and tell your community members that it’s Poverty in America Awareness Month so that they are also inspired to improve the community or will spread the word about this awesome month.
9. Always show respect to people working at minimum wage. Be courteous and respectful of their efforts or just greet them with a simple smile. You never know how much a smile can improve their day.
10. Use public transportation whenever possible. Your support helps to insure that public transportation remains available for us all.

We hope these tips have inspired you to support Poverty in America Awareness Month! Tell us what other community service activities you plan on doing to commemorate Poverty in America Awareness Month.

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!