As the holiday season approaches, messages of thanksgiving and gratitude become more prominent. Sites promoting social activism such as DoSomething.org provide quippy lists for volunteer activities you can do on Thanksgiving without cutting into the usual family meals and football games. There’s nothing wrong with being thankful, or expressing thankfulness by sharing the love. There’s a problem, however, when volunteer efforts are solely focused on the six weeks a year between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.
Last year, one of the volunteer organizations I lead attempted to coordinate with a local soup kitchen in mid-November. Group members thought it would be nice to volunteer at a time when being thankful for what you have is so heavily emphasized. After weeks of emails and phone calls, we received our answer: “No, but we appreciate it. This is the only time of year when we have a surplus of volunteers.” Later, when speaking with one of my friends, he told me he wanted to take his kid to a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving, to serve food and to teach his son about the importance of gratitude. Serving food is a good low-skill activity for children, but as we get older, we can offer more.
According to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, “The truth is that relatively few pantries and kitchens need more untrained volunteers to perform manual food service tasks. What these agencies really need are dedicated long-term volunteers or professional and technical volunteers … who can help increase the organization’s capacity to meet client needs.” Serving food is one of the most basic forms of volunteering. It requires few prerequisites, and is instantly gratifying. You serve food, a person eats food. There. Done. In other scenarios, one can volunteer a technical service to an organization and it may take a longer amount of time for such an action to influence the organization, but the effect is broader and longer-lasting.
Going through the HungerVolunteer website, different types of volunteering are ranked by level of helpfulness. Direct donations of manual labor and money are helpful. Donation of skills and technical capabilities are more helpful and more necessary to maximize the effects of other forms of volunteering.
Part of the effectiveness of volunteering relies on consistency. If you only volunteer at a soup kitchen once a year, then yes, you’ve done a good thing. No one will dispute that. But gratitude is not learned in a single session, and the greatest good doesn’t come from the rare moments volunteers typically show up. According to HungerVolunteer.org, volunteers are critical to the distribution of food, but are more valuable when they “serve the agency on a regular, recurring basis.” Consistency is key. Volunteering frequently creates an infrastructure, both within the organization and within the idea of promoting gratitude, whether in yourself or others.
There are a few factors one must consider before giving back, namely why you are volunteering. Are you volunteering to feel better about yourself or to fill a need? It’s easier to give in times of crisis. A crisis is a one-time deal. Hunger is a perpetual need, with over 23 million Americans living in food deserts. To give anything (time, money, food) repeatedly requires commitment. Volunteering isn’t about how good it makes you look to your peers or how good it makes you feel. That positive feeling should not be the primary incentive for altruistic actions. Volunteering is about filling a need and that need isn’t seasonal. The desire to help out shouldn’t be seasonal either.