The Untold Benefits of Volunteering
Giving back doesn’t do good just for the community.
Giving back is a great way to contribute to a cause or community in a meaningful way to improve people’s lives. But the time and effort you spend don’t just benefit the cause or community. There are unrealized benefits that come to you — the volunteer.
Creates Perspective
Working with underserved communities reveals the stark contrasts in people’s quality of life. International volunteers with organizations like the Peace Corps or Doctors Without Borders partner with local governments to address critical quality-of-life issues such as healthcare. Upon return, they often state they have a refreshed perspective on what really matters in life and the real obstacles people face. Closer to home, I volunteered in SF’s Bayview — Hunter’s Point and realized how the lack of green space affects the community’s living experience. Research has shown that the physical surroundings a person lives in effects their emotional disposition. It made me thankful for growing up in an area where there is the ease of access to hiking trails and parks.
Going about our everyday lives, we become caught up in our individual problems and bubbles. Volunteering inspires empathy, helping us expand our bubbles to consider the stories of the people we walk, drive, and interact with every day. Volunteering helps us step out of our shoes and empathize with others to understand their experiences, problems, and where they come from. By stepping out of ourselves like this, we can get the 10,000-foot view of our own situations and have the emotional distance needed to contemplate and devise solutions.
Builds Gratitude
Hand in hand with perspective comes gratitude. An appreciative mindset focuses on the positives in one’s life, not what they don’t have. Personal power is found in valuing relationships and things we do have. According to Harvard Health,
In positive psychology research, gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.
Becoming grateful can build enduring resources for your personal growth and affects everything from relationships to overall outlook on life and the world. The perspective gained from volunteering fosters positive feelings about one’s own situation. Serving communities and understanding their situation and environment also helps us understand ours on a deeper level. With this depth of understanding, a person can become more self-aware. If sustained, these feelings can make one more content with their life and lead to personal flourishing.
Creates Confidence
Coupled with gratitude, volunteering is a great way to gain experience and build new skills. As a tree planter with Friends of the Urban Forest, I learned how to plant and maintain trees while using manual tools. As a Community Lead with TEDxSF, I fostered the volunteer community and created content for live-event marketing. While I was gaining these experiences, my key takeaway was increased confidence. Whether it be working with tools or organizing people, I became more self-assured in my ability to adapt, contribute, and take on new challenges. Increased confidence spills out into other parts of a person’s life and bolsters a desire to test personal limits. New experiences and skills can translate into the personal or professional domains of a person’s life — broadening one’s horizons.
Reduces Depression & Feelings of Isolation
Aside from gratitude and confidence, volunteering with others fosters a sense of community. The main takeaway from a study on PsyPost is that volunteering creates feelings of community and interconnectedness, reducing depression. A negative correlation was found between feelings of depression and volunteering, though data highlights that social connectedness is more impactful. Bonding with others over a common cause can be a bridge to creating new relationships and developing a shared sense of community over the activity, as you would see on any sports team. As a transplant to SF, I developed my personal community through volunteer organizations making new friends and mentors that I otherwise would not have made. Through a conference launch, workshops, and learning nights, I met awesome and motivating people and had a unique set of experiences with them — making the City more of a home.
The next time you have free time, look into volunteering with your local non-profit — you’ll never know whose day you will make or who you will meet.
