Community Volunteering, Become A Community Champion
Why should you volunteer?
What are the advantages of volunteering?
The first question everyone asks when thinking about volunteering is “why should I volunteer”?
Volunteering is a benefit to everyone involved, the community/group receiving aid/support, the individual volunteer, as it will increase their self-confidence, self-esteem, and life satisfaction, by giving their time and seeing the benefit of their hard work. Another benefit is to yourself, you can gain valuable skills while volunteering, and gain a sense of community while seeing the benefits of those around you. Soft skills are the most commonly built upon skills during volunteering, things such as social skills, interpersonal communication and your personal development, however our volunteering opportunities vary and offer a variety of experiences to grow from. Another great reason for volunteering is to meet like minded people and encourage healthy socially and personally growth. Whatever the task at hand we look for the positives and how we can help ourselves become the best version of ourselves.
What volunteering opportunities do we have?
We have a few projects open to volunteers as well as possible research and office work. We are always looking for more individuals who would be able to help us with desk research for our projects, or a more hands on role liaising and working directly with community stakeholders.
An example of our services would be helping elderly individuals. There are many projects out there to help elderly specifically during this COVID time where isolation is a big problem for older individuals. These projects could be arranging a meeting between a few volunteers and elderly individuals to giving them some social interaction during these tough times.
It has been identified by our preliminary desk research regarding the LGBTQI+ community that during the pandemic many have been ostracised, isolated and discriminated against while stuck in unwelcoming/intolerant households or have experience negative effects of prolonged social isolation. At this time, we are looking for volunteers who can help us to distribute and take part in a survey around LGBTQI+ individuals to assess what can be done to help and how we can help. Our survey is for those who work with, or who are part of the LBGTQI+ community and revolves around developing digital literacy within the community and professional working with LGBTQI+ members.
Our sister organisation LAW has recently worked on a COVID-19 project where we gained information from our volunteers to know which way to point the project. For the project we disseminated good practises and awareness of things such as mask wearing, fact checking, hand sanitizer usage and more. We are now looking for individuals who can help on a plastic pollution project, specifically regarding raising awareness of micro plastics and what the individual can do to reduce their carbon footprint.