Volunteering: What’s in it for you?

 

Living in small communities there are endless opportunities to volunteer. Helping can be at the local library or information centre, driving the health shuttle, being involved in a local service club or sports team, charity auctions, or school PTA. Or it may be a wider cause such as buying a piece of a New Zealand beach.

Those of us who answer the call to help know the benefit to the community or the group we are offering to help, but do we understand the benefits to ourselves from volunteering?

Helping others increases our own happiness. A 2014 Harvard health report, Simple Changes Big Rewards, showed that people who volunteered monthly were significantly happier than those who had never volunteered. Those who volunteered fortnightly or weekly were even happier.

Volunteering for an organisation or community group can connect you to others and your community. It can help you meet people when moving into a new area, find work, learn new skills, have new experiences, develop new interests, make new friends, feel a sense of achievement, and can benefit your mental and physical wellbeing. When asked why they do it, volunteers often express a sense of achievement and motivation, which comes from their desire and enthusiasm to help.

Recently Year 13 students and staff at Otamatea High School spent 18 hours walking with many other Relay for Life teams around a 400 metre track to raise money for cancer research. So what was in it for these young people? An opportunity to remember people special to them, to step out of their comfort zone (many teenagers love to do this), to hang out with their friends all night and eat ‘high energy’ food and a chance to help others and feel their efforts could help towards finding a cure.

It has also been shown that employers are much more likely to employ a candidate with volunteering experience over one without, and nearly all volunteers who volunteered to learn new skills, had benefitted either by getting their first job, improving their salary, or being promoted.

So that has to be good for YOU!

n Libby Jones is involved in many community organisations in both paid and volunteer roles. She has experience in social services, health and education including governance, funding, research, clinical and management roles.