What's the right volunteering opportunity for you?
Millions of Americans have found their own answer, but it all boils down to this: Whether you volunteer for a nonprofit or an educational, religious, political or human-services group, the right volunteer gig is one that is meaningful to you and fits into both your personal and professional lives.
That sounds simple, but to make volunteering successful for you, you have to ask and answer many questions about the organizations you consider. Among them:
- Do you fully embrace the organization's cause?
- Do you want volunteering to be an extension of your paying job or a departure from it? Which skills do you want to use?
- Does your level of commitment mesh with the volunteer organization's needs? Do you want to start with a one-time commitment, a few hours a week for a year or something in between?
- If you want to meet like-minded individuals, can you find them at the organization? Which sort of population do you want to help? Children? The elderly? Teenagers?
- When you visit the organization, do you get a good vibe? Do the volunteers look pleasantly busy and seem fulfilled with their work?
- Is the organization committed to providing you with ongoing stimulation and change, or is it just looking for warm bodies?
Diverse Reasons for Volunteering
All volunteers have their own motivations, which translate into criteria for what feels right for them. For Alan Katz, the reasons are very personal.
"I connected with the NKF, because I donated a kidney to my brother," says Katz, who volunteers with the National Kidney Foundation of Greater New York (NKF). On the Foundation's Young Professionals Committee, "we put on golf events and a charity auction to raise money," he explains. Between monthly meetings, Katz works on tasks like helping to redesign the group's Web site. Katz's day job is senior account executive in public relations at Makovsky & Company in New York.
For others, volunteering means serving a personal interest with professional skills.
Steven Zirinsky, owner of Zirinsky Architecture, volunteered to help a small community in which he has a vested interest: the block of West 104th Street in Manhattan that he calls home. For the block association, he is steering a project to replace 1950s streetlights with lamps in the style of the block's turn-of-the-century houses.
Zirinsky also donates a few hours of architectural consultation to charity auctions. Although this occasionally leads to a chance to bid on a paying job, "you've got to do the volunteering because you want to," he says.
Volunteer Matching
If you don't have a specific cause or organization in mind, where can you start to look?
"Volunteer centers and online services are good for folks who don't know what they want to do," says Amanda Missey, director of business volunteer services for the Volunteer Center of Bergen County in Hackensack, New Jersey.
For those who want to use their career skills to the fullest in their volunteer work, there are organizations like the Taproot Foundation, which recruited more than 1,000 IT, HR and marketing professionals in 2004 to do pro bono work for nonprofits in San Francisco and New York. "Our volunteers would be billed out at $100 or more per hour," explains James Shepard Jr., national director of programs. Given their professional value, they don't want to get stuck doing menial work. "Many come to us because they want to build their professional network," he says.
This article originally appeared on Monster.com.
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