Featured: Top Tips for Family Volunteering

---

Volunteering as a family is a brilliant idea! It allows for quality time spent together while helping fulfill a community need and instilling the volunteer spirit into your children. What could be better? We’re here to help you get started!

Here are our top tips for family volunteering….

1. Give yourself some time to plan

This could probably be said for any type of volunteering, but finding a volunteer job as a family group (especially with small children) will take some time. Each organization has its own process and timeline in place, so it can sometimes take awhile for you to get through that process.

Also, depending on the age of your children, it may take some time to find a place or an opportunity that can even accept your family as a volunteer. Which brings us to…

2. Don’t get discouraged

We agree that there are far too few organizations and opportunities out there to take young volunteers. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if children could be involved at each and every organization so they could learn from a young age about all of the many different types of volunteering and nonprofit organizations?

But, that’s not the reality that we live in right now. Organizations have many restrictions, risks and reasons that they have to be cautious about the age of volunteers they can allow. Safety and liability (of your children and their clients). Productivity. Space. Training challenges. Time constraints. Age appropriateness of the jobs available. The list goes on and on.

The good news is that there ARE opportunities available and other ways you can teach your children the value of volunteering from a young age. And finding opportunities will get easier each year that they get older. Pretty soon they’ll be volunteering on their own, and you’ll be wondering where the time went!

3. Choosing your volunteer activity

First, to figure out where you want to volunteer or what kinds of things you want to do, consider these questions:

• Why do you want to volunteer?
• What issues does your family care about or want to help with?
• What does your family enjoy doing together?
• Does your family have any special talents or skills to share with others?
• Can you do a one-time event or would you rather do something ongoing? Be realistic about your schedules and availabilities. Don’t over-commit your family….it’s usually best to start out slow and work up to more commitment. Also consider the attention span of your little ones.
• What do you want your family to learn?
• What do you and your kids have the ability to do?

4. Begin your search!

There are several resources you can use to find available opportunities or come up with ideas about giving back as a family:

• Volunteer Kalamazoo! We make a concerted effort to ask organizations to list their family-friendly volunteer opportunities, so you can search for these opportunities on our website at any time throughout the year. At publishing, we had 65 opportunities listed that may be appropriate for a parent and child ranging in age from 0-12 to do together. Remember that each opportunity has its own “Minimum age with Parent” listed, so you will need to check this before you proceed. The younger the volunteer, the fewer things that are available. You can browse this listing on our website.
• Keep an eye on our Opportunity Calendar. Things are added on a regular basis, and special one-time events are more likely to be family-friendly. You’ll still have to check the description and verify what ages the event can handle and what’s appropriate for your family.
• Attend one of our 4 community-wide Days of Service. We strive to make these opportunities open to all ages, and are a great way to make a small time commitment, but still do some good with a larger group. The events are organized around 4 National Days of Service: MLK Day (January 16), Global Youth Service Days (April 20-22), 9/11 Day of Service and Remembrance, Make a Difference Day (October 27) (Please note: Dates are subject to change based on local events/needs.)
• If in doubt, inquire with an organization. You can browse through a large list of organizations on our website. If you see one that your family would love to help, but they don’t have family-friendly opportunities listed, contact them anyway and see what they have to say. Maybe there is an opportunity that they don’t advertise, or maybe they’d be willing to make an exception for an outstanding family. Don’t be upset if they tell you no….some organizations really can’t accommodate younger volunteers, but it never hurts to ask!
• Check out Generous Hands, Inc in Vicksburg. They have a great set-up for young volunteers. They don’t currently list with us because they’re so popular, they don’t have to!
• You don’t have to let our listing limit your family. It’s a great place to start, but there are projects you can do from home or on your own (especially great for little ones) and still help. Consider some examples: making fleece blankets for kids in crisis/shelters; picking up litter in a public space near your house (be safe!); making holiday cards/valentines/letters for senior citizens, veterans or our overseas troops; check into planning a BINGO party or other games for a senior center/home; make first aid kids, personal care bags, or sack lunches for a shelter; Make “giggle bags” or activity bags for hospitalized children (contact Crayons4Kids about helping with their efforts); go through your own toy collection to donate gently used toys to disadvantaged kids; make motivational signs and get noisemakers and stand on the sidelines and cheer or inquire about working a water station at a local race (Greater Kalamazoo Girls On the Run 5K or the Kalamazoo Marathon are fun ones!); join a community garden and take your kids to help you with the garden work/harvesting; pick up extra school supplies when you do your kids’ back-to-school shopping and donate them….or anything else you can dream up! As always, call the benefiting organization before you start to get specifications and find out their needs.
• We’ve found a few great online resources that have other ideas for getting involved: The Volunteer Family, GenerationOn & Compassionate Kids. There’s also a good article on Volunteer Spot with family volunteering ideas. Check these out for other project ideas and guidance about volunteering as a family.

5. Know what to expect

This is also good advice for all volunteers, but make sure you know what is expected of your family before you show up. Do they require an orientation ahead of time? Do you need to bring supplies or dress a certain way? Any safety considerations for you or your children? Are they expecting you to work a certain shift/complete a specific project or is it flexible for you to leave if your 5-year-old has an unexpected meltdown?

6. Be patient

As a parent, you already know this, but patience will be required. Smaller children may not be able to stay on task as well as older children. Celebrate everyone’s accomplishments, regardless of the size.

7. Use the experience to grow as a family

• Take time to reflect on your volunteer activities with your children. Talk about the issues (in an age-appropriate way) that allows them to learn from what you’re doing. Discuss what you did, why you did it and how you felt about it.
• Even if you aren’t volunteering, you can still bring up issues and community needs with your children and brainstorm ways that you can help together in the future. Or talk about your next volunteering activity or explore other options on ways to continue or keep everyone involved.

8. Read about our experiences

Take it from the experts…we’ve been there and tried that! Read about how our experiences went: The Great, The Manageable & The Ugly.

Did you miss a feature story, and want to find it again? Click here to see all of our past Featured Stories.

Comments are closed.