Hello friends! It's been a hot minute! I miss writing on here and I miss writing in general, but I have been so busy with going back to school and the holidays happening. I'm currently at work and I have some down time so I wanted to make this post!
Volunteering has always been a part of my life. I can remember my youth group volunteering at local shelters and even going on a road trips to help re-finish houses in different states. I've always had good memories with volunteering with my friends. I never really took into consideration that I was helping people, if I'm honest. Of course, I was a pre-teen who didn't want to dive deep into any type of feelings, so I just showed up at volunteer places that my church set up and helped.
As I got older, I had stopped volunteering. I had a really uncomfortable time once when I went to Feed My Starving Children and helped out at their center. I was just...not great at doing what we needed to do there. I think it put me off for a few years because I was "so bad at it."
But as I matured in the past few years, I realized there was a lot more volunteer opportunities than I know. I came across VolunteerMatch.org somehow and there was where I found a world I never knew was there! You type in your location and BAM, it shows you places that need volunteers.
I started off by writing a blog post on mental health for a small company around the Chicago area. I actually forget which one...but I did it for free and I found them through Volunteer Match. I had a few phone calls with the social media director and talked about my ideas for a blog post. After the post went live, it was very well received and they wanted to keep me on board to write more. I ended up passing on that, but another bigger opportunity arose.
NAMI.
National Alliance on Mental Illness. A HUGE organization that I really looked up to. Long story short, the NAMI center about an hour away from me needed volunteers. I had a couple interviews and I got the position of NAMI speaker in the Northern Illinois region. All thanks to Volunteer Match (which I'm not sponsored by! I swear!)
I remember my first ever speech I gave with NAMI. It was in a state mental health institution and it was in real bad shape. Looking around, I remember seeing all the faces of grumpy people who just wanted to not be there (I would be the same way). I started my speech and I made all the right pauses, all the right breath intakes, and it went so good. The patients had to fill out a sheet of paper saying if I did well or not. Kind of like a review. I asked if I could have a copy of the reviews and the officer there was shocked. "I never had anyone ask to see them before" she said.
