Beating the “I’m too busy” mentality to volunteer
When friends ask, “How are you?” I often respond with “Busy.” I’ve been saying that as an excuse to avoid many things in life, often things I don’t really want to do: learning a new programming language, teaching myself Spanish, cooking. But I’ve also been using it as an excuse for something that shouldn’t be put off until tomorrow: volunteer work.
“If not now, when?” is a proverb I grew up hearing often. And it’s one I’ve been thinking about as a graduate student at New York University. I told myself I was too busy to volunteer as an undergraduate student, then as a reporter, and then as an 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. worker applying to graduate school. And now I’m a graduate student. Of course I don’t have time.
There’s a pattern here — it’s that I’m never actually going to do it.
My close childhood friend Justine Berger moved to New York City two-and-a-half years ago and volunteers through New York Cares, a non-profit that connects volunteers to projects. She works 60 hours a week as a copywriter, but she finds time to teach swim lessons, serve meals and raise money. My assignment for class was to write a story that I’m part of somehow. So I signed up for New York Cares the second week of November, attended orientation Wednesday night, and volunteered Friday afternoon filling bags with compost and Saturday morning teaching a woman how to use Excel.
Here’s what I learned: I do have time. And volunteer work isn’t just about “doing good,” but about being part of your community. I feel like I got more out of it than I put into it. I went to Queens for the first time since moving to New York City. I saw the beautiful main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library with its golden facade and expansive lobby. I learned about how composting works — the temperatures during the process go higher than 130 degrees fahrenheit! I met and learned from people with whom I would never have normally crossed paths.
On Friday afternoon, I took the train to the Queensbridge Park Composting Site. Large piles of what look like dirt sit underneath tarps. Each is a mixture of food scraps, wood chips and leaves in a different stage of an aerobic process. At the end, a pile of dark black compost, easy to shovel, no smell. Myself and a half-dozen volunteers filled bags for two hours, which people came by to pick up for their community gardens. We joked around and got to know each other as we traded off filling and tying the bags.
Leah Retherford, project manager for the New York City Compost Project, took breaks to explain what we were doing and answer questions. I felt like a kid on a field trip to the outdoor part of a science museum. Education is part of the project’s mission, and she wanted us to understand how each stage of the process is related: food waste becomes compost, which goes on gardens and becomes useful.
On Saturday morning, I arrived at the Brooklyn Public Library not quite sure what I would be doing. I had signed up for an open computer lab where people could come in to ask questions. I ended up working with the same woman for the two hours. She wanted to learn how to use Excel for her job as an administrator at an adult education center. I showed her how to make a table, insert and delete columns and rows, sort the data and format the table to print. A few times she got excited after working through an action on her own and cheered. I cheered along with her. It was thrilling.
The project leader, Rita Huang, said she has been volunteering for 15 years. She works in digital marketing, and volunteers to walk shelter dogs, teach technology skills and serve meals. I told her that I often feel too busy, and asked her advice.
“You have to make it happen at first, and once you know you’re making a difference, you know you’re helping people, and you feel good about it, you will find time to come back,” Huang said. “In a way, set the bar really low so you achieve it, and once you do it, it becomes so easy. It’s not even about finding time, it’s just something I do. I go to the gym, I go to yoga, I volunteer.”
Habit, I thought to myself. I can make a new habit. I’ve done that before.
I asked my friend Justine Berger the same question. Some weekends she just wants to stay home and relax, she said, especially after a gruelling week at work. But, “I always end up looking forward to volunteering. It makes my weekends feel infinitely more productive, and it feels good knowing that I’ve helped someone else, even just a little bit.”
I thought about a Wall Street Journal article I read once that suggests you say “It’s not a priority” instead of “I don’t have time.”
“Volunteering isn’t a priority. Helping people isn’t a priority. Serving my community isn’t a priority.”
None of those feel right.
Realistically, it would be a burden for me to volunteer every week while in graduate school. But I can prioritize this, at least once a month. And as Huang told me: “You help whenever you can and wherever you can.”
