Does Anyone Know of Any Summer Volunteer Programs

2blue
Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:25:48 +0000

Check around in your community, especially for opportunities in areas that are of interest to you. For example, my son wants to major in computer science. He did some volunteer work for a local organization. The woman who had been working on this particular project had been slowly hunt and peck typing away at a database. My son wrote some sort of script to enter certain information quickly and then typed in the rest. He’s a really fast typist. The people there were blown away by how much he did for them.

Some other students I know are interested in becoming veterinarians. They volunteer at the local animal shelter cleaning cages and walking dogs. Since you’re only interested in a few weeks of volunteering, perhaps you could find a shelter which will have some of its regular staff taking off for summer vacation. They might welcome a short-time volunteer to pick up the slack.

Our food bank loves to have people come in and help. Here, in addition to a regular ongoing volunteer schedule, you can just sign up for a certain shift. It’s easy to see what openings you have in your schedule and then go down and sign up for a shift in the current week. Our food bank tends to have lots of senior citizen volunteers and they are thrilled to get a teen who can do some of the heavier lifting for them.

You could also call local service organizations in your community and ask them if they know of organizations needing help. My son found out about both the foodbank and his database project by asking someone at a local organization if they knew where his skills might be needed.

I hope that helps. It can be really fun. It is easy to think you may not have much to offer. Around here my son discovered many volunteers are senior citizens and what he as a high schooler could offer was a great complement to their strengths.