What do you do?

I was volunteering this morning at Food For Free, like I do every month. They were offering free tax prep services for low income households. I asked questions about what low income meant, and I guessed, oh so if you make like 30-40K that would make you low income. The guy literally started laughing. He was like, no, you'd have to earn less than that to qualify. That just made me think, how many of you make that little? It goes back to this class article by the NYTimes. I would guess most people reading this are in the upper middle to upper classes.

I know that I don't do enough. I've been considering adding more volunteering. Once a month for an hour or two is not really a lot. I picked something that seemed interesting, fit in my schedule, and was reasonably convenient. I know, you're not supposed to pick something convenient, but let's be realistic, I knew going really far out of my way really inconvenient times was not going to build consistency.

I feel like I should do more, but I think I need to find other things close to home that I'm interested in. I know if I'm not really interested there's no way I'll go, I'll make up excuses and eventually stop doing it. I've tried looking for places near me, but places like volunteermatch.com aren't that great. There's a huge program, BostonCares, but you have to pay them $20 to start doing it, which I know I can write off on my taxes, but it just seems a little wrong to pay them to start volunteering with their programs. It is a good idea to have an agregate, I guess I just wish they raised money instead of making people pay.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do next. Do some more research I guess.

What have you been doing? Where did you find opportunities?

Comments

Colin N. said…
Hi, I'm colin, the product manager at thrive. My last gig was at a startup in boston called good2gether. The whole goal of good2gether is to help people find opportunities for volunteering near them. Check it out: http://dogoodchannel.com/ . Haven't been following too closely for the past 10 months, but it sounds exactly like what you are looking for. When I was in Boston, I also joined Boston Cares... spent the $20 (good for life) but never did an event. One of the good things with boston cares is that you do receive some training and the professionalism of events and people you'll be volunteering with should be higher. Good luck!

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