Volunteering

Last week was National Volunteer Week. One group decided to have us fill out a "Why do you volunteer" poster.

I have always volunteered. https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/12/alberni-valley-hospice-society-volunteer.html I started volunteering at a very early age. In a sense my parents modelled this idea and impulse for volunteering activity, although I don't really recall their being terribly involved in volunteer organisations outside of the church. But, nevertheless, volunteering was inculcated into me from a very early age.

I did do volunteer working for the church, but I also volunteered for a number of other organisations. Some were related to the church. I was on the board of the BC Area of Christian Camping International, and when I first became involved with the BC Youth Parliament https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/01/mgg-1c-memoirs-of-grieving-gnome-bcyp.html , or Older Boys Parliament of BC, as it then was, it was at a time when it still had some tentative and tenuous links to its origin as a christian boys organisation.

At one point, having built myself up quite a repertoire of volunteer work and positions, Physicians. I moved and lost all of them. This was rather unfortunate for me. I was very sad to to lose the positions, and the context, and even the work. But, such is life. However, I continued volunteering in some capacity or other over time. One of my volunteer activities was blood donations. In Canada we don't get paid for blood donations And I gave blood quite extensively. I have a relatively rare blood type, and so certain factors in my blood are useful to specific programs where they separated out those factors and and returned other components of my blood to me so that I could donate more often. So, there are various and sundry ways of being involved in volunteering.

Volunteering can also help you, and benefit you, in a wide variety of ways. https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/11/depression-3-do-unto-others.html

When I am doing career preparation presentations I always stress the importance of volunteering. https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/03/mgg-43-atwt-volunteering.html It was volunteering that got me a chance to get onto the Internet, over forty years ago, before the Internet was even called the Internet, when the Internet was accessible only to a very few. I estimate that there were only a thousand people involved in the Internet at that point, rather than the billions that are now.

Volunteering teaches you many things. There are the tasks that you are being asked to do, but there is also the important experience of getting along with other people in a Cooperative work situation. Volunteer work is probably going to be different from your normal work. And it's probably also going to be different from the work culture of your professional or working life. As a professional, and as a consultant, I primarily work alone. (I remember an article many years ago about everybody insisting that their jobs involved high-tech. The author was making the point that not everybody could be involved in high-tech. And so there had to be a definition and distinction. His proposed distinction was that if your mother understood what you did, you didn't work in high-tech. Not only did my mother never, ever understand what I did for a living, but most of my bosses didn't understand it either. So, I worked alone.) This is fine. It's what professionals primarily do. But it is a bit lonely. So, working in a volunteer situation, on a crew with others, does make a nice change.

Much of my volunteer work is Community Policing (which is mostly about keeping people alive); and Emergency Support Services https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/03/sermon-11-disaster-administration-and.html (which is mostly about keeping people alive); and the hospice society https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/02/sermon-7-faith-and-works-and-intuitive.html (which, in my case, is mostly about comforting people who are grieving because their people have not been kept alive); so it's nice to go out with the trail crew https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/03/trail-maintenance-crew.html , currently removing sword fern and salmonberry to keep it from encroaching on the trails, and, legitimately, kill something.

I'm not just involved in the churches (good thing) ( https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/01/online-safety-seminar.html ), but also with the Sunshine Club (the "old folks" activities in town; I'm already on the Board), Lazy Ass Hikers https://www.facebook.com/events/1047484169691419/ , the Jesus Film Festival https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/11/jesus-film-festivaljff-2024.html , Reconciliaction https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/03/reconciliaction.html , and a variety of minor side projects, such as security seminars, arts walks/seminars https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/08/public-art-in-port-alberni-introduction.html , a speaker's bureau/club, a computer club, grief guys https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/03/grief-guys.html , an experimental CISSP seminar https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/02/cissp-seminar-free.html , grief bibliographies https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2022/12/grief-bibliography.html , and writing sermons https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html