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When you are still early in your career, you may feel like you do not have much time to yourself. Besides work, you are likely looking to spend time with family and friends and possibly work a side hustle to make ends meet.
Volunteer work might not be one of your priorities. However, getting involved in your community can help you more than you might think.
7 Ways for Young Professionals to Get Involved
Mentor Someone Else
Not everyone has a trusted older family member who is willing to spend time with them and mentor them. But young adults still need mentors, no matter their background, and there are plenty of those who have no role model.
Becoming a mentor can encourage a young person to do things that can affect their own communities and leave a big impact. You might look to the National Mentoring Partnership to see if your area has any opportunities. You can also consider mentoring a family member, especially if you are one of the first in your family to go to college or get a professional job.
You can help other students wanting to go to college by giving them advice on the application process. You could even help them with the approval process for a student loan by becoming a cosigner so they can pay for their education.
Help With a Summer Camp
Helping with a summer camp can help you have fun while helping others. There are many opportunities for summer camp counseling positions, and these types of camps can help kids have something fun to do until school starts up again.
You can teach important life skills and life lessons, and you will also get to enjoy their activities along with them, and your 20s are a perfect time for this type of volunteer work because kids tend to relate better to younger adults than older ones.
Not to mention the benefits of a mentor are vast and some of these relationships can grow beyond this one experience.
Take Time to Do Volunteer Work
If you have some extra hours each week, you could volunteer at a homeless shelter, animal shelter, or food bank. Maybe you are great with kids and could brighten homeless children’s lives by playing games with them, or maybe you have excellent organizational skills and could organize a toy or food drive.
If you are great with technology, you might be able to teach elderly people in nursing homes how to use technology to connect with far away family members. Volunteering can help make your community a better area, and there are many ways to do it. There are local websites that can help you connect with this type of traditional volunteer work.
Help Revitalize the Area
Revitalization projects happen all the time, and you might not even realize it. There are likely some happening nearly every weekend. You might be able to help clean up trash at a park, build a playground for kids, work on a community garden, or work with Habitat for Humanity. These types of projects can help the community look better.
When the area looks better, people will take more pride in the areas they live in, and this pride can make others more willing to step in to make the area even better.
Volunteer as a Tutor
Becoming a tutor allows you to share your wisdom with another person, and it can be a very fulfilling task. You do not have to be an expert in any subject area because there are many young students who are simply looking to learn basic skills such as elementary-level math and language.
You can ask schools in the area to see if there are any volunteer-based tutoring programs. Even if you do not love kids, you can still volunteer as a tutor because there are adult programs for people who want to get their GED or who are under-educated.
Find Virtual Opportunities
There are many opportunities to help virtually if you do not like the idea of getting together with a group of strangers. There are organizations that connect professionals with small businesses and entrepreneurs.
You can use skills like marketing to advise these entrepreneurs on how they can become more efficient or grow their companies. This is a great way to grow your own professional skills, and it can give you something to put on your resume as you grow in your career.
Look for Opportunities to Lead
Volunteer work can also help you exercise leadership skills, especially when you are early in your career and may not have many leadership opportunities there yet. You can start taking the lead when it comes to smaller projects, such as heading up a food drive for a local food bank.
You can easily transfer these leadership skills to other areas in your career, and having leadership outside your regular job can also give you more confidence for other types of projects.
These are just some of the ways to get involved as a young professional! Which one resonates the most with you?
About the Author
Nicole Booz is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of GenTwenty, GenThirty, and The Capsule Collab. She has a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and is the author of The Kidult Handbook (Simon & Schuster May 2018). She currently lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two sons. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s probably hiking, eating brunch, or planning her next great adventure.
Website: genthirty.com
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