Why I consider myself a lifelong volunteer

I'm inspired to write this post after an amazing volunteering experience I had last Friday at the Second Harvest Food Bank. (1 in 10 people in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties receive food from Second Harvest). Along with colleagues from work, I sorted giant bins of food from pasta to tomato soup to cat food for 2 hours. It was amazing.

It made me think: Why have I been volunteering for over a decade now?

As a lifelong volunteer, I'd like to share 3 perspectives on why volunteering deeply matters to me and why you should consider doing more of it.

1) Volunteering means contributing in a system of distributed trust

Look around you. There is a trust deficit in both companies and governments. Power and resources are concentrating in Cryptonomicon-style walled gardens. The Invisible Hand will continue to feed you, but in return for more and more pounds of flesh.

But look around again. New models of trust are emerging. Trust is decentralizing and distributed networks with encryption are creating a new foundation for tomorrow. They are reminding us that the individual isn't just a "consumer" or "labor," she has ideas, spirit, and a willingness to do more.

I have seen this idea play out beautifully in volunteering. Volunteering is thousands of little individual actions, which change the world. Volunteering is energy. Energy fights entropy. It can overcome collective anger and frustration and build new models of trust.

What we can't solve individually, we might be able to solve together in the future.

(Source: https://www.provenance.org/news/movement/trust-digital-age/)

2) Volunteering brings together energies you’d not meet otherwise

I also love volunteering because it has always immersed me in true diversity. What do I mean? It means not only working with volunteers of different genders, ages, and life stages, but different cognitive and emotional styles. Scott Page even argues this kind of diversity outperforms cross-functional business teams.

With Stanford Alumni Consulting Team (ACT), I was introduced to this diversity in the GSB alumni community. I've made new friends and learnt so much from them. If you don’t know about Stanford ACT, read here – it's an amazing concept of pairing up alumni across the years with Bay Area non-profits to provide pro bono consulting.

(Source: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/alumni/volunteering/act)

And there's more. Volunteering is also about the energies of the people you volunteer for. Do you know the work and life of a school teacher? A teenager learning about leadership? An outdoor education instructor? I've spoken to all of these and more. Volunteering is a great way to step beyond your four walls into other's work lives.

3) Volunteering is about finding and sharing a bigger purpose

There is a myth that people are less committed to volunteering than in the past. This isn't true. Look at the data below from VolunteerMatch, a great non-profit itself. Visits on their website reached an all-time high earlier this year. There is a positive and encouraging consciousness in the US about volunteering in 2017 and this trend is likely to continue with the next generation. Why are all these people volunteering?

(Source: http://blogs.volunteermatch.org/volunteeringiscsr/2017/02/02/volunteermatchs-site-traffic-hits-all-time-high-post-inauguration/)

People volunteer because they find the volunteering work "meaningful." How many corporate employees do you know who find their work meaningful? Meaningful enough that they consider it their life's work, not just a “hustle” for unicorn status. Work that changes the lives of someone else, not just because it is a collective hedonic treadmill.

As Peter Drucker once noted, non-profits have figured out the "meaning" business better than most corporations. Volunteering is a great way to find what you truly love. That you love enough to want to do it for free.

So go to VolunteerMatch.org to find a project to volunteer for. Or go to your library. Or school. Or create your own project and enroll other volunteers.