| I have benefitted from being a volunteer for a long time, the great degree of transferrable skills: ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTITUDE DEVELOPMENT: Volunteering is great in that the barrier is incredibly low to make things happen. Want to see something happen? Go do it, or better yet, learn to do it with others. You generally don't need permission to start your own thing and make a difference if you don't see something happening. LEARN TO ALWAYS ADD VALUE, FIRST: Volunteering taught me to add value first, unconditionally. Volunteering is a habit that can be practiced to the point of it being second nature, and that's when it gets really special. ORGANIC NETWORK DEPTH: Through adding value always, a side effect, volunteering gradually grew my network through similarly practicing people who over time think of you as you think of them. I genuinely have an interest in people and curious enough that I can be sincere about giving a shit about others. Most people think of networking as primarily a professional thing. Networking helps you volunteer much better too, when you have a track record of getting things done and successes under your belt with a group of people - if need arises, a group of you can move into the realm of community organizing and not just volunteering. COMMUNITY ORGANIZING: When you learn to work with people that can't always work with others - this is a highly transferrable skill. Beyond this, creating approachable opportunities for others to volunteer who can only see their time as x hours a month is very powerful, if you find this something you want to do. Direct and transferrable parallels to startup growth. LOOKING BACK (and forward).. you get a track record. You know you can learn anything, build and direct towards things. An odd thing to look back and see that you start to forget the things you have work on because you get the real gift of volunteering - an ability to be a doer and use it in other areas of your life. My volunteer experience is as odd as it is varied, and I get to be able to use a lot of it in my professional life, from the small things of helping where needed at a table, whether it's event planning it's starting a tiny conference and growing it to 300 people for many years, or learning the logistics of organizing a parade for over 20,000 people for a decade, and recently organizing tens of thousands of meals for volunteers during a disaster fire, I have picked up valuable skills such as being a driving force in raising funds (totalling in the hundreds of thousands) for universities, food banks, and other disasters. It doesn't matter if the volunteering role is big, or small. Small things that are meant to click, do, and you get to serve something that hopefully will out live you for 5-10-20 years. I'm studying what's different about the positive volunteer movements that seem to last a very long time (and outgrow the founder and continue on for 50-100 years.) So far, I sense it's about the ability for future volunteers to have the experience of depth and quality of connections, not quantity. You have nothing to lose but your time volunteering, and it's often a better way to spend it than to do nothing at all with it, or expose yourself to a little wider world. |