This is a great question. Volunteering is an awesome way to give back to the community, and finding a volunteering opportunity at a young age can help you develop skills and learn from other people of different backgrounds and experiences. The key thing to look for when you’re volunteering is to find an experience in which you can genuinely engage with the activity, and you can genuinely make some small change in the community you’re serving. This is important because a) you should actually be interested in who you’re serving and how you are serving them, b) you gain a lot more out of experiences that are hands-on and in which you can help people, and c) you’ll have far more fun doing those types of volunteering.
So how do you maximize your volunteer experience. First find a field in which you’re interested. Let’s say you want to do something in healthcare. A good place to start would be to email all your local hospitals and their volunteer departments. Ask them what is the application process for gaining a position and what they might expect out of potential volunteers. If you can arrange a sit-down meeting with them, they could help you pinpoint your interests and figure out how you can best serve them. You can also become more creative with your engagement. If you’re interested in healthcare, you can identify what aspect of treatment really speaks to you and then get involved with that aspect specifically. For instance, if you like talking to patients but cannot obtain a hospital position, try looking into helpline service and see if you can get trained on how to talk to somebody who is distressed.
Let’s take another example. Let’s say you’re ultimately interested in the business field, but you want to volunteer to get more experience but also give back to the community. In this case, you could try searching up nearby law clinics that serve undocumented immigrants. You could email them with your qualifications and tell them that you are willing to perform free work. By detailing why you’re interested in giving back and what you hope to gain out of the experience, you can arrange a meeting and offer help in business administration aspects of the clinic.
These are some examples of things to get you going. For high impact service, a lot of times you might have to look for positions that are not established. This is how you can get creative with your time and offer your services to the community with the most impact. This is also how you might be able to grow and develop your own capacities. If you volunteer for a helpline (as in the first example) or if you volunteer for business administration services in the law clinic (as in the second example), you gain a tremendous amount of experience as you are performing important work for the community. You can also receive a letter of recommendation from the supervisor at the volunteer location and document the work you do for the community. This will also help you in applications in the future.
Stay safe, keep serving your community, and be happy! That’s it for now.
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