Ready to volunteer?

By Matilda Charles
Have you considered what you’ll do with your spare time in the New Year? How about volunteering? There are so many ways we can step up.
AmeriCorps Seniors (americorps.gov/serve/americorps-seniors) provides opportunities to over 200,000 seniors every year to go into the community and give back. If there’s an interest, there’s likely a place that needs help.
The Foster Grandparent Program hooks up seniors and children ranging from premature babies all the way to young teenage mothers.
In the Seniors RSVP Program, seniors are matched with organizations that help others in the community.
The Senior Companion Program pairs a volunteer with another senior who needs help with daily living activities.
What do we seniors get out of volunteering? We gain new skills or improve the ones we already have as we share our experience. We can earn a small stipend. We can lessen our isolation and feelings of loneliness as we interact with others. And we experience better health, including mental health with a decrease in anxiety and depression.
The only eligibility requirement is that volunteers must be age 55 and older.
If you’re interested in exploring volunteering opportunities, go online to the AmeriCorps website and click on the Pathfinder. Put your state or area of interest in the search box. You’ll be shown lists of agencies that can use your volunteer help as well as the email contact and website for those agencies.
You might end up teaching a child to read, or volunteering as an aide in a kindergarten class. You might help another senior with tasks he or she can no longer do, such as laundry or writing letters to family. You could work behind the counter at a recreation center signing out basketballs. You might sort vegetables in a food bank. The opportunities are nearly endless.
If you need inspiration, look at the National Service Reports for your state to see what others have been doing.
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