Volunteering is Good for the Soul

 

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. 

Here's what one of them said:

I will never get over that one word: "Hope"

I stopped NAMI once Covid hit (even though I had such great opportunities lined up).

I decided this year to hand out cards made by my friends to all the residents in my senior living community that I work at. It was called Cup of Cheer holiday cards and it was a HUGE hit! At first the residents gave me a "huh?" face when I handed them a card. I explained a bit and told them that I put a letter from me in the card too, to explain more. 

I had residents who barely talk to me, come up and say "that card really warmed my heart. Thank you." Family members of the residents kept telling me how much their parents loved the cards. All in all, I'll definitely be doing it next year, too! 

I feel like volunteering my time to help others really grew with me as I got older. As my boss rudely put it once: "Megan, you have a savior complex. It's not great." After I tried shaking that comment off, I realized that helping people isn't a bad thing. If volunteering didn't give others joy, then that's a sad life. 

I hope you guys put some of your time to help others this new year. VolunteerMatch.Org is a great way to find things like I did! Put your skills to use, ya'll! 

As an end to this post, please enjoy this picture of me and my resident wearing the same shirt (Santa hat for privacy reasons!)