Posts Tagged ‘Community’

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Want to Make a New Years Resolution Stick? Volunteer!

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012

It’s almost that time of year again. After spending too much time in the malls, eating a ton of food, and socializing with too many awkward family members Christmas will come to a close. Now what? It is New Years resolution time!

“Yay! I cannot wait to make another resolution that I will never actually be able to keep.” When most people make a New Years resolution, they tend to try to cut back on things that may negatively influence their lives such as fast food, but what about resolving to do something good?

A New Years resolution that may not be so hard to keep is volunteering your time to help your community! This resolution will not only influence your life positively, but also the well-being of your community.

How exactly can you turn this resolution into an action rather than a statement? Easy! Follow these 5 tips that help you keep a New Years resolution and apply them to volunteering.

  1. Make sure to choose your activity wisely: Now it is great to be an overachiever, but let’s not kid ourselves you will not fit an activity into your routine, if it is not something that you enjoy. For example, if you are not the outdoorsy type, cleaning up a river bank probably is not your thing. Instead of choosing the newest trend in service, choose your project based on your interests. There is an activity for everyone and every passion.
  2. Quit being self obsessed: Volunteering allows you to be selfless and take yourself out of the daily stresses of normal life. You are able to try something that you have never had the time to do in the past. While you should choose an activity that you enjoy, you should also choose the activity for the right reasons. Get a group of friends together and help out a cause today!
  3. Be mindful of your decision: Choosing an activity that you are passionate about will promote growth from your experience. For example, if you are interested in helping your community’s education you should choose a project such as tutoring. Seeing the effects of your service such as your student passing a test, may make you want to serve in bigger projects or devote more of your time. You will grow from the experience because you are devoting yourself to something you truly care about. You are selflessly pursuing your passions.
  4. Understand your limits: Reward yourself for the great work you participated in. Go grab a bite to eat with the people who you volunteered with or go home and take a bubble bath. Just do something that will not only be enjoyable but will be a relaxing reward for you. You will be more likely to complete an activity and fit it into your routine if you can reward yourself after. After all, who doesn’t like coming home and relaxing after a hard day’s work?
  5. Recruit some friends: Tell your friends about your resolution and ask them if they would like to participate as well. You are more likely to go serve in person if you have people with you who share in your interests and support your efforts. Who knows they may even want to make service their resolution this year?

Do these tips work? See for yourself, make service your New Years resolution. Service not only will benefit your community, but it will also benefit yourself! This year make a resolution that you can actually keep! Pledge to serve today.

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7 Benefits to Volunteering for the Holidays

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

The holidays are just around the corner (“AHH I still have so much to do!”). We all know this time can be extremely stressful, especially during holidays that require gift giving.

The holidays are often so overwhelming and stressful because the focus is centered on giving commercial goods to our loved ones. We become so fixated on giving the perfect gift to others that we often forget the real meaning of the holidays. Although the holidays are a time of giving, it is also important to help those around us who may not be fortunate enough to have a holiday full of presents, parties, and big holiday meals.

So instead of fixating yourself on the material part of the holidays, make a pledge of service to your community this holiday season! Not only will you feel less anxious about the holidays because you are making a beneficial mark on someone else, you are also making someone’s holidays a little cheerier than they may have originally anticipated. After all, your holidays might be a little better, as well knowing that someone gets to enjoy the time just as much as you do.

Are you convinced that you can stay away from the malls for one day to help someone else? Alright well here are some more benefits to volunteering this holiday season in case you need some more convincing.

  • Volunteering helps you develop new life skills you may not have learned otherwise. Do you want to learn carpentry, become more social, or practice a new language? You can do all these things through volunteering! Volunteering is the perfect way to discover something that you’re really good at while contributing to the benefit of your community (it’s a win-win situation).
  • Volunteering is a means of establishing yourself in the community. The commercial side of the holidays has caused a disconnect between community members. Bridge that gap by coming together as a community and helping those who are less fortunate this holiday season. It not only builds relationships between community members, but it also helps members understand the issues that affect their immediate community.
  • Volunteering provides a sense of motivation and a feeling of achievement. Volunteers are motivated in their work because they are able to work for a cause or passion that they truly believe in. When one is able to work for an important cause they feel a sense of achievement because they see the importance that their good work has for someone else.
  • Increase your career opportunities. Volunteering looks great on school and job applications. It is also a way to explore different career paths if you are thinking of a switch. If this is not enough motivation for you, then what is?
  • Volunteering is a great way to gain new real world experience hands on! Volunteering is a way to gain life experiences in ways that you never would have thought possible.
  • Meet a new group of people you may not have met otherwise. Volunteering with others in your community brings together a diverse group with similar interests who may not have met otherwise. You can not only learn more about your community, but you may also build new relationships and friendships!
  • Volunteering serves as a good reflection of your entire self. Volunteering as an extracurricular activity reflects beneficially on your character. It sends the message that you have a good work and self balance. Who knows you may even inspire your family, friends, and coworkers to volunteer as well?

We hope these benefits are convincing enough to get you involved in giving back this holiday season. Your service acts can be big or small depending on your interests and schedule. Make your holiday more meaningful and less stressful; help make your community a better place today!

New to service? Check out our friends at generationOn today for their Holiday Gift Campaign! Every time a pledge of service is made no matter how big or small, Hasbro will donate a toy to a child in need through Toys for Tots (up to 100,000 toys).

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” — Dr. Seuss

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The Impact of Neighboring Programs

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011

Neighboring had the promise to build community and to strengthen families yet not much was known about it except through anecdotal evidence. HandsOn Network did a study of neighboring programs and found that the benefits reached beyond the programs.

Neighboring helps children and youth succeed by providing opportunities, resources, and role models necessary to become successful adults.

Neighboring generates opportunities. Through programs that nurture through neighborhood-based caring connections, opportunities for children and youth expand. Neighboring programs help to build an extended community that provides resources and opportunities that might not be available in the community.

Neighbors helping neighborhood children

  • Serving as tutors, mentors, and readers
  • Providing meals, books, and child care assistance
  • Assembling and donating small gifts
  • Conducting workshops on healthy lifestyles and community issues
  • Ensuring safe spaces for children to freely play and grow

Neighboring links resources and children. Resources travel by way of parents and guardians, with benefits spilling over to children. Parents who get the resources to support their children, and this frees up resources to assist with things they need at home.

Neighboring creates role models for children. Children see caring and kindness modeled when neighbors provide service. More importantly, when volunteers are people that children realate to,  the notion of “helping ourselves” becomes more possible, imbuing self-reliance.

Neighboring changes the lines of accountability. The accountability to children in Neighboring is different than a traditional social service model. Parents and neighbors have a personal stake.

Neighboring helps to improve the quality of the places in which the nation’s most vulnerable children and families live.

Neighboring gives power. Shaping the community agenda heightens individuals’ desire to engage and their self-efficacy.

Neighboring connects neighbors.  By joining people in collective action, Neighboring helps people realize that they are not alone and their neighbors care and want success for everybody.

Neighboring helps to provide low-income workers with the supports they need to get and keep good jobs and to build assets and savings.

Neighboring connects people with necessary resources. Through tax assistance programs, low-income people receive real resources. Resident volunteers involved in tax preparation tended to view it as not just a service but a re-education in how people think about getting their taxes done.

Neighboring builds financial skills and knowledge. Through the tax programs, resident volunteers gain knowledge of taxes that affect their own lives.

Neighboring helps promote workforce participation through job creation and skill development.

Neighboring indirectly affects workforce participation. Beneficiary knowledge, changed through more traditional areas of education, is also imparted by resident volunteers. There are also instances when resident volunteers are offered employment as a result of their volunteering, especially volunteer tax preparers.

Have you run a neighboring program? What kind of impacts have you seen with your program? Let us know in the comments!

For more information on neighboring, visit the HandsOn Network Neighboring Site in the Tools and Resources Section.

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Won’t You Be My Neighbor? A Place-Based Approach to Volunteering

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

Neighbors help neighbors.

Every day, they use their time and their gifts to strengthen families and communities.

Many, especially those living in under-resourced communities, work hard to deal with the challenges of communities where unemployment, violence, and drugs are taking their toll. In the face of these obstacles, community residents look to each other for the connections to vital resources that will improve their odds of succeeding.

The good news is that volunteering is already present in under-resourced communities; it is crucial to the lives of everyone in them.

A neighbor guides children across a busy intersection on the way to school.

A young friend makes meals for an elderly woman confined to a wheelchair.

A next-door neighbor takes care of a single mom’s small children while she attends night school.

Neighbors are helping neighbors in communities everywhere.

The service that takes place in low-income communities, however, is often informal, organic, and not recognized as volunteering—even by those who do it. The term we use for neighbors stepping in to take care of others in our communities is Neighboring.

Neighboring is an asset- and empowerment-based approach to community action that engages underserved and under-resourced community members to find innovative, sustainable solutions to address local challenges. Describing neighboring as asset-based acknowledges that all members of a community can offer something to improve the community.

They can share their talents, skills, knowledge, or resources. The resident-led approach primarily focuses on a specific geographic area (i.e., ZIP code, neighborhood, or street) in which the majority of the volunteers, activities, and organization come from within the community itself.

Neighboring is a place-based way of volunteering that builds on the talents and resources of local residents to strengthen families and elevate struggling communities into flourishing, vibrant places to live. It is about the connections among residents that support positive individual and community behavior based on mutual respect, responsibility, and ownership.

Neighboring is most successful in communities that lack access to the typical resources that promote self-sufficiency, such as food, clothing, jobs, and health care.

Neighboring projects may be initiated by outside organizations, but the ultimate goal of these projects is to have neighborhood residents take ownership of the projects and to support their neighborhoods. Here, the sponsoring organization’s primary role is as a catalyst: it empowers residents to lead their own projects with their own volunteers from their own community and, in doing so, to use their own talents.

This approach places the focus and organization of the initiative on the residents–putting residents in  charge of projects because they know best what their neighborhoods need . This approach allows the agency to step back when a critical mass is achieved with neighboring and ensure sustainability of the effort.

Projects don’t have to be initiated by an outside organization, though. Neighbors can come together to make the changes they want to see in their neighborhood, whether it’s cleaner streets, safe places for children to play, or trying to make their neighborhoods safer.

Over the next few days, we’re going to look at how neighboring can help to bring in your community and ways to integrate it into existing volunteer programs. Our goal is to inspire, equip, and mobilize more nonprofit organizations to see their most challenged communities as places of promise—places where resident skills, talents, and desires are seen as wealth on which to capitalize in order to create sustained, lasting change.

 

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Posted in Neighboring, Volunteering | 5 Comments »

2011 National Conference on Volunteering and Service

Monday, May 9th, 2011

This year’s National Conference on Volunteering and Service is being held in New Orleans; a city that understands the effect that volunteers can have on a city. After hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill, thousands of volunteers from all across the country came to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to help rebuild and recover. These volunteers have given of their money and time to help rebuild, but there’s still a lot of work done to bring the Gulf Coast back to the way it was before the recent disasters.

While, overall, the conference helps people who work with volunteers in the nonprofit and for profit sector, there are three program tracts that will help attendees to tailor their experience to be the most useful for them. The tracts look at the impact that volunteers can have on their community, the strength that volunteers bring to bear when they serve, and how volunteers help to build and support communities.

volunteer, volunteering, volunteerismLooking at the impact of volunteers highlights the individual, institutional, and community change that volunteers can bring about through their service. Sessions in the impact track focus on specific solutions that volunteers can bring to economic, environmental, and health problems, disaster management, and veterans’ and education issues that our communities face.

The strength of volunteers is highlighted in sessions that help volunteer managers to more efficiently direct that strength. These sessions will help to harness the innovative ideas, partnerships, and passion that volunteers bring to the organizations that they serve with. Proven methods and emerging trends in volunteer management will be shared in sessions that can help volunteer programs to adapt to the ever changing social and socio-economic realities of society and the volunteering sector.

These sessions will help you to learn how to more effectively manage volunteers and manage for results, how to bring the power of technology and media to bear to support your programs, how to leverage partnerships for results, and how to work with businesses to build successful employee volunteer programs.

Sessions that focus on community not only look at the places where live, but the groups that people belong to and build themselves. These communities can be harnessed to create massive change, and are already primed for volunteering, leadership, and service.

Boomers and youth have a lot to contribute to their communities. There are Cities of Service across the country that are using volunteers to address some of those cities’ most pressing issues. Faith-based and neighborhood organizations are stepping up to fill in where services are lacking in communities. Service is being reimagined across the country, especially service in rural areas.

This year’s Conference is taking shape to be the largest Conference to date. There will be knowledge shared and connections made here that couldn’t happen anywhere else. And, among all of the learning and networking, we’ll be sure to take some time to celebrate everyone that is working so hard to improve their world through service.

To find out how to register for the National Conference on Volunteering and Service, click here. To find out more about what will be happening at the Conference, follow and like the Conference .

You can find out more about the National Conference on Volunteering and Service on the Points of Light Blog, which looks at what the Conference offers the volunteering sector, and a video from New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu.

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Posted in Education, Environment, Equip, Events, Faith, Impact | 3 Comments »

How Community Supports Individual Action

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

When we talk about community here on the HandsOn blog, what we usually mean is a group of people connected by geography. We talk about the people who live in the same city or the same neighborhood.

Community isn’t restricted to geography, though.

Communities can be tied together by a common interest. Increasingly, communities are seated in technology rather than geography. The internet is a phenomenal tool for people with similar interests to find one another and have shared experiences that let them create a sense of community.

Are communities required to produce change?

An individual can affect someone by being a mentor, or can clean up a park by themselves, or tutor students on their own. Groups of individuals, though, coming together for the shared purpose of helping youth or improving their environment are able to accomplish more than the individuals alone.

A sense of community helps to support the engaged individual and the work that they are doing.

How do communities come together to do this? What happens when someone wants to bring a group of people together to clean a park instead of doing it on their own?

Lets say that they put a notice up in places in their neighborhood-at the park, in the library, in the grocery store-asking people to come together to talk about cleaning the park. People come to the meeting as strangers, maybe they bring a friend with them, and are driven by individual needs. Everyone comes together by virtue of their location and spends time together planning the clean up event.

After the logistics of the event are worked out, the clean up day comes and everyone comes together at the park. As they work together, they achieve their goal (a clean park) and the group members gain a shared status of people working together to make their neighborhood better. After a few more projects, members of the group bring in their friends and the group grows in size.

Communities come together based on individual needs, but become bound by location and contact between individuals. Shared experience and investment in the group help to make individual bonds stronger, and so does the sense of status that surrounds membership in a group.

Community helps to improve and support the work of individuals. A community helps to support its members and brings together a set of shared resources that makes the community more able to act and have an impact than the individual could on their own. A community of people is stronger and more able to have influence than any individual member of that community.

 

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A Community’s Greatest Asset – YOU!

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

volunteer volunteering volunteerismToday’s post comes from Kenneth Tran, an AmeriCorps member serving with HandsOn Network

We cannot live only for ourselves.  A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.  ~Herman Melville

According to Webster’s Dictionary, Community is defined as “a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interest.” On the Get HandsOn website, we are catering to the service minded community who are looking to make a lasting change in their environment. The shared social interest of service is the calling that’s bringing out the great activity out of our community.

With Follow the Leader, we have seen tremendous development and participation from our network of Service Leaders. From blog posts about leading a successful resume workshop, to recruiting local volunteers for upcoming projects, members are becoming more active, not only in their local physical community, but also on their online one of over 7000 members.

Volunteer leaders on the site are successfully modeling projects that have come before them. With the easy start up projects featured in the Project Playbooks, service-minded individuals are downloading projects that have been proven successful and sustainable from the HandsOn Network library.

They are replicating similar impacts in their local environment and making positive changes for those around them. They are impacting the even larger systems when they come back on to the site, and posting follow ups to their projects – letting the other GHO leaders know how it went and passing on their experiences.

Follow the Leader focuses on people fulfilling their commitments from Tag and doing the work. So far, I like what I’m seeing! Every day, I get emails updating me about the previous day’s activities on the site, and it is very encouraging to see new members not only registering on the site, but making unique commitments and telling the community about the causes they care about. Each of them are addressing needs specific to their location and are applying the Project Playbooks to meet those needs.

There are so many events going on that can get people discouraged and feeling hopeless. But with one act of service, thoughtful citizens who care enough to make a difference can affect positive change and make a difference to those around them. At the end of the day, we all want to belong to something. What better way to feel connected than leaving a mark on your community that matters to you.

Here’s my invitation for you to be a part of our community! Check out Get HandsOn and sign up to take part in Follow the Leader. Download a Playbook, recruit members of your community, and be ready to make a difference.  You never know who is looking up to your acts of service and will model your behavior. Caring about the community around us benefits everyone involved and the rewards from it will stretch far beyond your immediate surroundings.

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40 Ways to Love Your Community on Valentine’s Day

Monday, February 14th, 2011

1. Organize your child’s classroom to make Valentine’s cards for residents of a local senior center.

2. Plant trees in a local park or green space.

3. Visit and entertain the patients at a local children’s hospital.

4. Tutor a child.

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5. Volunteer to be the story hour reader at the local library.

6. Help a deserving neighbor shovel snow, rake leaves, clean gutters or wash windows.

7. Donate to the local food bank.

8. Cook and serve meal at a local shelter.

9. Lead a coat drive and deliver gently worn coats to a local homeless shelter.

Volunteer

10. Make and send care packages to service men and women overseas.

11. Collect combs, toothbrushes, shampoo and other essentials for a homeless shelter.

12. Adopt a grandparent.

13. Volunteer to pick up groceries or medicine for a senior citizen.

14. Give some time to delivering meals to the homebound.

15. Organize a dance or sing-along event at a local senior center.

16. Teach someone something you know.

17. Paint an educational mural at a local school.

18. Teach English to someone who needs help learning it.

19. Turn a vacant lot into a vibrant community green space.

Volunteer

20. Plant flowers instead of giving cut flowers.

21. Organize a public issues forum in your community.

22. Create a wildlife habitat, nature trail or outdoor classroom for a local school.

23. Recycle.

24. Carpool.

25. Give your time to the local animal shelter.

26. Be a mentor.

27. Give up your seat on the bus or train to someone who looks tired.

28. Give blood.

29. Sign up to be a scout leader.

30. Coach.

31. Organize a project for Global Youth Service Day.

Volunteer32. Be a good listener.

33. Advocate for legislation you care about.

34. Shop and eat locally.

35. Thank someone.

36. Trust.

37. Recognize someone who’s been a “point of light” in your life. Nominate them for a Daily Point of Light Award.

38. Recruit a friend to help.

39. Find a volunteer project at HandsOn Network.

40. Look for the good in all people.

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Posted in Equip, Inspire, Service, Volunteering, Volunteerism | 1 Comment »

Post-election Thoughts: What Matters More Than Ever

Friday, November 5th, 2010

Michelle Nunnby Michelle Nunn, CEO, Points of Light Institute and Co-Founder, HandsOn Network

The election is now behind us, and it’s clear that many citizens wanted a change.  There is a frustration with the current state of affairs and the direction of the country.  Often it seems that voters selected candidates without enthusiasm or confidence that the current political system is capable of dealing with the tough challenges.

Forty years ago, John W. Gardner founded Common Cause by saying, “Everybody’s organized but the people.  Now it’s the citizens’ turn.”

This invocation seems particularly relevant today.  We have dynamic and engaged citizens who are creating new platforms for organizing.  Across the nation, there are individuals, “super-empowered citizens,” who are leading others and creating innovative change.  These leaders are emblematic of the best spirit of America.  They are tackling tough problems through direct service and creative action.  They are joining hands across differences, political and otherwise, and acting to create practical and pragmatic solutions.  We need to do more to highlight and lift them up and to follow their lead.

The current giant game of virtual Tag we launched last week is one innovative way to reach and connect individuals who can and want to make a difference.  People sign up for a volunteer commitment, then tag their friends through Twitter or Facebook or email to join their commitment or create their own.  (The interactive Tag web site is www.gethandson.com.) This is a celebration of the “hands on” network of service leaders who are creating change in our nation and world.

John Gardner, that remarkable civic entrepreneur and champion of citizen action, also said, “Don’t let the vast superstructure of civilization mislead you.  Everything comes back to the talent and energy and sense of purpose of human beings.”

People — people involved in the political system, in their communities, and acting as global citizens — are the answer.

After 9-11, Susan Morissette started a quilt in the form of a U.S flag to allow children to express their feelings about victims of that tragic day.  That “Heart of America” quilt now covers an acre and weighs almost one ton.  She recently said, “Over the years I found that it was not only our children that needed to feel helpful.  Our nation, in fact our world, needed that unity…When the chips are down, people come together. I have one acre of visual proof.”

Susan is one of our Daily Points of Light Award winners, and she is one of the citizens who is creating change through her passion and action.  On Tuesday she was elected for the first time to office as a member of Maine’s House of Representatives.

We need leaders such as Susan to continue to lead grassroots change and also to step into the political system to serve in public office.  We need leaders on both sides of the aisle who can find ways of stitching us together and helping us unite in common purpose around the tough challenges of our day.

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