5 Ways You Can Make Your Community Better By Volunteering
Just like in most other cities in the country, there are many opportunities to Volunteer in San Diego. Volunteering is one of the best ways for you to give back to your community and it will be profoundly rewarding for you to take part in helping make it a better place. You deserve to be commended for wanting to become a volunteer. Although you may hear it often, you may not exactly be aware of all the benefits that volunteerism does for a community. So how exactly does volunteering make your community better? The following are the ways that you are making your community better by volunteering.
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1. Immediate Results
The first and most obvious benefit that a community receives from volunteerism is the immediate outcome of the volunteer event. If you volunteered for a community cleanup, for example, your community will have less litter and perhaps have a revitalized community garden. By volunteering in soup kitchens, you’ll be helping provide meals to hungry neighbors to sustain them in their daily struggles. There are other life-sustaining volunteer services that you can take part in where the positive results are almost instant.
2. Volunteering Brings People Together
Volunteering connects the volunteers with other volunteers and the people that they are helping. These connections foster meaningful relationships that will break through ethnicity, class and other social barriers that often cause divisions in communities. This interaction will also help build trust among the members of the community once they realize the innate goodness of their neighbors.
3. It Empowers the Community
Because volunteering forges better relationships within the community, it also empowers them at the same time. As the neighbors begin to build trust with one another, they become better equipped to address and do something about other pressing issues in their community. The bonds that they form will give them the confidence, power and influence that they need to make a difference.
4. It Helps the Community Become More Resilient
Although volunteerism may not be able to solve all of the community’s problems at once, it will help it become more resilient and capable of resolving them. The more issues that communities work together to resolve, the better they become in anticipating and in dealing with future problems. Overcoming adversities effectively serve to fortify the resilience of communities.
5. Volunteerism Saves Money
Community work does require funds to be effective, and these funds come from different sources including government funding, contributions and donations. Your help as a volunteer will significantly cut the needed cost for the community work to be successful. The funds that you help save will be rechanneled to benefit your community even more. The extra money saved could mean more meals for the hungry, beds for the homeless and more development programs for the community’s youth.
Your community benefits from volunteerism other ways. The best part of becoming a volunteer is that you’ll reap tons of benefits from it for yourself. Volunteering will help you build character, gain more confidence and enjoy a meaningful experience from which you can draw valuable life-lessons that you can also share with others.
Author: Bruno Souza
