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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.

6. Sow some seeds

David Conrads/Staff
Volunteers working November 3 planting tulips on Meyer Bldv, near Troost Avenue, as part of the "Tulips on Troost" project in Kansas City, Missouri.

  • By Noelle Swan Staff writer

Studies have shown that planting trees can reduce traffic accidents, deter crime, and improve property values.

While many gardens are managed by professional landscapers, some towns rely on volunteers to plant, weed, and care for plantings on traffic islands, town greens, and other areas of the neighborhood.

In Boston, Mayor Thomas Menino distributes daffodil bulbs each fall to residents willing to plant them in city-owned green spaces all over Boston's neighborhoods. When spring breaks, Bostonians all over the city are treated to hundreds of thousands of yellow and white blooms.

In Kansas City, Missouri, residents have planted over 250,000 tulip bulbs over the past five years in memory of Kansas City's first medical doctor Benoist Troost. 

Families can join already established community gardening organizations or team up with neighbors to start a new project, such as greening an abandoned lot.

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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.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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