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Year-round giving: 8 family volunteering opportunities

However your family contributes to the community, the experience is bound to bring you, your children, and your neighbors closer together. Here are 8 family-friendly volunteer opportunities.

8. Reach out to neighbors

Anne Brown/Staff, File
Hi Neighbor is an event that took place over two nights in Worthington, Ohio, in which neighbors ventured across their lawns to meet the people who share their neighborhood.

  • By Noelle Swan Staff writer

Community building and giving do not have to be relegated to formal events and activities, but can also be a part of every day. Simply taking a moment to greet neighbors and ask how they are doing can go a long way in fostering a connected and vibrant community.

Everyone needs help from time to time, and once families start to build connections with their immediate neighbors, they are likely to start to see small ways that they can help.

Supporting a struggling neighbor by delivering a meal, offering to watch their children for an afternoon, or taking their dog for a walk can solidify strong community bonds. To include more neighbors, websites such as Take Them a Meal offer simple ways to coordinate supporting others through meal delivery.

Websites such as Nextdoor can also help create private online networks for you and your neighbors, creating opportunities to share neighborhood news, ask each other for help, and connect online when you aren't able to connect immediately in person.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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