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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.

7. Visit a nursing home

John Nordell/Staff, File
Sisters Ani (right) and Talene Bilazarian read a book of poems to Carroll Whitaker. Nursing home costs can be written off as a medical expense.

  • By Noelle Swan Staff writer

There was a time when multiple generations routinely mingled in large families and small communities. Today, the oldest and youngest generations often spend most of their time apart. Arranging for children to spend time with elderly members of the community can be rewarding for all parties involved.

While it can be rewarding to run errands or to assist individuals in their homes, many seniors simply appreciate having some company. Many senior centers and nursing homes welcome visits from families even if they are not related to the program clients. Families can join in during a structured art or music activity or can spend time talking with, reading to, or just being with the residents. Infants and very young children are usually welcome, provided they are rested, fed, and relatively well-behaved.

Websites such as www.volunteermatch.org can provide localized listings for volunteer opportunities with seniors.

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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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