Family Volunteering

Family volunteering encourages the members of a family to volunteer as a unit. It can be done by the whole family together, by one parent and one child or teen, or with extended family such as grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. It can be as simple as creating cards for children in the hospital or as complex as bonding hundreds of families together in a day of service at a community park. However families choose to do it, families engaged in service can help mobilize thousands of new volunteers and instill in the next generation a lifelong commitment to volunteering.

The Importance of Family Service

Research suggests that engaging parents and their children in service together has important positive outcomes for everyone involved. It benefits:

·    Children and youth by cultivating positive values, such as caring and empathy, and by developing a commitment to service both now and in the future.

·    Parents by giving them more quality time with their children and all the other benefits of volunteering including increased interpersonal skills and improved health.

·    Families by increasing their sense of cohesion, well-being, and connections to the broader community.

·    Sponsoring organizations and civic life by attracting more volunteers, increasing volunteer commitments, and bringing new energy to traditional volunteer opportunities.

Challenges to Family Volunteering

Along with the benefits of family volunteering, organizations can encounter a variety of real and perceived difficulties when looking to engage families in service and service-learning:

·    Families are busy.

·    Parents, especially low-income parents, do not know about available opportunities for family service.

·    Programming is age-segregated and families often have difficulty finding appropriate opportunities.

·    Tweens and teens may not want to volunteer with their parents.

·    Organizations are just expanding into family-friendly opportunities and have a lack of experience in engaging families in service and service-learning.

Project Ideas

Opening Your Heart and Home

• Organize a fundraiser (e.g., run, walk, etc.) to send a child to summer camp .
• Drive homebound residents to doctors’ appointments, the grocery store or to visit friends.
• Help build a home or shelter in your community.
• Build walking-path bridges, BBQ pits, picnic tables or trails at local parks.
• Be a surrogate family for developmentally disabled adults and include them in your family activities.
• Become a foster family and take care of a child in your community who needs help.
• Coordinate a food drive for people in your community.
• Design a fundraising event to host a child/young adult for a portion of the summer.
• Organize a community “closet cleaning” day and donate old clothes, furniture and other items to a homeless shelter or other organization.
• Help newly arrived immigrant families celebrate their Thanksgiving by collecting food, kitchen supplies, toiletries, clothing, school supplies and toys.

Helping Hands Sprucing Up the Community

• Partner with another family to repair or paint the home of an elderly couple or a family in need.
• Organize a community “closet cleaning” day/week and donate the items to a homeless shelter or other organization.
• Plant and tend a garden for your neighbors.
• Spruce up baseball diamonds by painting the dugout and fence and pulling weeds.

Seniors

• Visit a nursing home.
• Maintain yards or shovel the walks of older adults.
• Take a homebound elderly friend to lunch or dinner.
• Create an intergenerational wisdom quilt (ask adults or seniors for quotes or advice to youth, write them on pieces of paper and tape to the wall).

Working with Animals

• Walk dogs at the animal shelter.
• Conduct a puppy wash at the local animal shelter.
• Volunteer at a zoo working with the animals.
• Care for the pet of a sick person.

For more information regarding family volunteering call the Volunteer Center of Cedar Valley at 272-2087 or visit www.vccv.org.

This content is republished from Points of Light.