The Benefits of Volunteering for a Charity
An enormous number of people give up their spare time every day or every week to help out for free at a charity. This type of participation can be anything from spending time at a food bank ensuring that hungry families are getting fed to working in a charity shop on the local high street, enabling local people to get good deals on second-hand goods while also benefiting the charity.
People generally volunteer at a charity that has similar values to their own, so if someone is a lifelong fan of cats, it would make sense for them to volunteer with the Cats Protection League or some other cat related charity.
If someone has experienced what it is like to be a war veteran, they may prefer to give their support to Help for Heroes. People will often volunteer to give back to a charity that has made a profound difference in their lives, so if someone was rescued by the RNLI when they got in trouble at sea, they may end up volunteering as a way of “paying the debt”, as they see it.
The Benefits of Volunteering for a Charity
The Feel Good Factor
The people who give up their time to volunteer are doing it for the best of reasons and should be applauded for their altruism and community-mindedness. There is also a real feel-good factor that people get when they are able to help one another and this is definitely a benefit of taking part in a volunteering lifestyle.
The idea of service to others with nothing expected in return is also a basic tenet of some religions and being able to help them is seen as a privilege that should be embraced. This is the reason that so many faith-based groups of all persuasions are often directly involved with providing food assistance and shelter for rough sleepers. They are the people who are most visible and who most obviously require help with the basics of human living.
Getting to Know People
If you have just moved to an area, a sure way to quickly and easily get to know a lot of people is to get involved in any kind of volunteering work. You are basically stepping into a community of people who already carry out good work and may socialise together outside of their volunteering duties.
Most of the success you have in making friends and getting to know people will come down to picking a volunteering opportunity that matches your interests and demographic group. If you are someone who wants to meet a lot of people on the older side of the age spectrum, charity shops tend to be an excellent bet.
It makes sense because they are inside jobs that aren’t very physical in nature and many of the people who end up as volunteers will have first donated a spouse’s clothing to the shop when they passed away. This is often what sparks the idea to get involved and do some volunteering of their own, once the initial stage of grief has passed and they have had some time to realise that they need to get back out into the world and continue with their lives.
If you are looking for a younger and more active crowd, Mountain Rescue or the RNLI are much better bets as they require a level of fitness in order to take part in the hard, physical rescues that characterise so much of their work. If you are looking for a suitable opportunity to meet people through volunteering, taking your time to think through this kind of thing can help you to find the people that you will gel with.
Gaining Work Experience
Volunteering is also a really good chance for young people to get their first foot on their career ladder. It is common for young people to enter retail jobs while they are in high school or just after but it can sometimes be hard to get that first job because they have no experience.
Being able to say that they worked in a charity shop for a couple of months and provide a reference extolling their virtues can be enough to ensure that they no longer struggle to find something suitable.
From an experience on the CV standpoint it is excellent but they will also be learning from more experienced people with a range of skills that they have built up throughout their working lives. It may be that they see some of their volunteer colleagues as informal mentors, who can impart some valuable advice and help them to figure out some of their teenage problems.
Reducing Mental Ill Health
One of the best things about volunteering is that it makes the people involved feel like they are doing something useful. There is no doubt that they are doing something useful, but volunteering for a charity actually feels like it, in contrast to some jobs where it can feel like you are just pushing paper around a desk.
With a charity you can look at the good works they are performing and smile, knowing that the work you are doing is contributing to bringing in the money that is helping them to achieve it. This is one of the major benefits from volunteering with a charity. When some people retire, they lose their purpose in life because they feel like they have nothing left to offer.
Volunteering helps to dispel those negative thoughts and can help to stave off depression linked to this very significant change of circumstances by giving the volunteer a renewed purpose and a focus in their lives again.
The Whole of Society Benefits from Volunteering
The millions of people who volunteer every year in the UK are doing something amazing and for the best of reasons. They deserve any of these benefits that may rub off on them as they help to make the whole country a better place for everyone to live through their actions in their local communities.
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