Religious Volunteering: How to Get Started

One of the most satisfying things you can do is volunteer. Volunteering is arguably as rewarding for the volunteer as it is for the beneficiary, and it’s also a great way to become involved in your community. But where do you start?

If you’ve never volunteered before, local religious organizations serve as a great starting point for getting to know your charitable side. Even if you don’t personally consider yourself a religious person, many churches and religious charities would welcome your help in meeting the community’s needs. If you still need some ideas for how your volunteer services could be put to good use, check out the tips below:

Charity Drives
Religious organizations often organize community outreach events that are designed to assist the less fortunate in meeting daily needs. If you volunteer with a church, you could help with a community outreach event that provides nearby residents with Bibles, Bible covers and a bag of groceries. Clothing drives are popular at the end of summer when school is about to resume, and you can probably find a food drive to participate in during the holiday season. If you can’t find a charity drive to participate in, consider organizing your own. You could garner the support of multiple religious organizations and non-profits in your area to achieve a common goal.

Serving Meals
Many organizations recognize that some people are incapable of preparing a hot meal for themselves – perhaps due to disability or homelessness. Some religious organizations have shelter projects designed to give these people a hot meal every day and a place to stay if needed. You could volunteer your time once or twice a week to serve lunches or dinners at a nearby shelter, or find a mobile meal service to deliver hot food directly to the doorsteps of people in need.

Fundraisers
If there’s anything churches, charities and other religious organizations are in need of more than volunteers, it’s money. By volunteering to help raise money, you can help fill two needs at one time. To get started, ask your local church when the next bake sale is, and follow up by donating some fresh homemade cookies or an apple pie.

Do the Heavy Lifting
Community outreach programs and churches enjoy helping other people, but those good deeds don’t come without a great deal of ‘behind-the-scenes’ work. Offer up your own elbow grease by helping with the less glamorous side of charity. Your work pushing papers in the office or cleaning up the parking lot will be much appreciated and is just as important as organizing a big outreach.

Regardless of how you choose to start volunteering in your community, the most important step is getting started. Charity work should never feel like a chore, so be sure not to overwhelm yourself at first. Choose to help in an area that you feel passionate about, and do so according the schedule that works best for you. Remember, it isn’t about your qualifications – it’s about your willingness to serve.

My name is Alana Hartley and I am a student at Oakland University in Rochester, MI.  In December 2011 I traveled to Honduras on a Medical Brigade.  By using Empowered.org to organize the trip, I was able to raise over $1400 only a few months before embarking on this incredible journey.   I was able to send my Empowered.org link to family members who gladly and graciously donated to my cause. 

I am very thankful for Empowered.org because it gave me an easy way to spread the word about my trip.  It is also a very organized way to collect money (a donation is just a click away!).  Empowered.org also made it really easy for my group to organize itself and for everyone to get to know each other a little better before we traveled to Honduras together. 

As a result of our efforts with Empowered.org, the group of 34 students that I traveled with raised over $51,000 for the people of Honduras.  We were able to help more than 500 patients in the community of Hoya Grande in just three days!  We also helped with a Water Brigade in El Cantón by digging trenches and connecting water pipelines to homes.

This trip truly changed my life.  I am forever grateful for Global Brigades and Empowered.org for making this brigade possible.  Attending this brigade made me much more aware of the health problems that people face in countries like Honduras.  I am much more grateful for what I have and motivated to help people in any way I can.

I am returning to Honduras in December 2012 and am excited to utilize Empowered.org for all my fundraising needs.  I hope to utilize their social media features and ease of use to let others know how they can help the people of Honduras.  With the help of Empowered.org, my goal is to raise as much as I did last year, if not more.

Without Empowered.org, raising the money necessary for my brigades would be impossible.  I am grateful for the simplicity of this site and how it has helped me spread the word about a great passion of mine – helping others.

A famous quote, said by Mahatma Gandhi, captures the sentiment I felt after returning from Honduras.  “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

With the help of Global Brigades and Empowered.org, I was able to raise money to travel to Honduras and ended up finding myself through helping others.

Michelle Chen used Empowered to raise over $3,000 to help her and a group of students from the College of William & Mary travel to Honduras to work on medical & development projects in under-resourced communities. Michelle says her trip wouldn’t have been possible without Empowered’s fundraising and social media tools!

This March, we, the College of William & Mary’s Global Medical Brigades went on our first ever brigade to Honduras. During our brigade, we set up a clinic in the rural community of Mata de Platano. We worked stations where we saw patients during triage, consultation, dental, gynecology, pharmacy, and public health charlas (educational talks) for children. It was an amazing, inspirational experience during which, over the course of a week, we saw 900 patients, interacted with community members, got tackled by enthusiastic children who loved stickers, practiced our Spanish skills with amused locals, and experienced the beauty of a different country and culture.

I am forever changed by the short amount of time I spent in Honduras – the people I met were optimistic, kind, and beautiful and were appreciative of everything that they had. Their spirit and outlook on life has definitely made me re-evaluate my own and be grateful for how lucky I am to have all that I have been provided with.

To fundraise for our brigade, we used Empowered.org. Through Empowered, we were able to, as a group, raise more than $3,000 over a period of 6 months. With this money, we were able to purchase all of the medications and supplies that we needed in order to serve the people of Mata de Platano. In addition to being able to buy everything that we needed this year, we still have about $2,000 left in our Empowered account that we will use for our brigade next year.

The major benefit of Empowered is that it is one centralized platform that all of our members use; therefore, in addition to seeing just one person’s profile, donors can view other members’ profiles as well as the William & Mary group page. Empowered also connects to social media sites, such as Facebook, that made it easier for us to share our brigade page and information with family and friends. My experience on our brigade was life-changing, and it would not have been possible without Empowered.”

-Michelle Chen, College of William and Mary