Seven minutes isn’t very much time. It’s too long for shower, too short to run a marathon, but it’s just right for getting a taste of doing something useful for your community. This week is the week to get your gluteals into gear and do something because it’s Volunteers’ Week 2011. Here’s our little list of seven ways you can be a seven minute volunteer and get that warm fuzzy feeling inside knowing you’ve done some good.
- THREElittleSTEPS: picking up rubbiish may not the most glamourous way to volunteer, but these guys have cleverly changed it from being a thing of drudgery to a thing of delight. By making it a challenge to pick up three pieces of rubbish a day, picking up someone’s old crisp packet or juicebox becomes an opportunity to help. You can then upload photos of your rubbish to their Facebook page to show off your contribution to cleaner streets.
- Volunteer digitally through Sparked, a website that allows you to volunteer with whichever computer based abilities you have, for a huge range of not-for-profit organisations. From copywriting to social media knowledge to translation, just fill in which skills you have and the website will come up with a whole bunch of suggestions of how you can help. You can contribute anything from five minutes to five hours (or more) of your time.
- Guerrilla Gardening. Find others in your area and go plant up a storm, making urban places more beautiful. You could also just get some of these fabulous seed bombs and go on your own guerrilla gardening mission.
- Orange’s Do Some Good app has a bit of something for everyone. With over 12 different organisations to help and every action only taking five minutes or less, it’s perfect for whiling away a bus journey, or time spent waiting for a tardy friend.
- Do good fast. Sign up to Flock Local, a causal volunteering service where you can just rock up and do something good for a local area. Previous flocks have included clearing up a woodlot and working on a community garden.
- Although some of the folks at Do The Green Thing HQ may disagree, it only takes about five minutes to sew Glove Love. We’re always after people who want to come in for a cuppa and get involved helping to sew and sort our sustainable range of fashion. Get in touch if you want to volunteer with us.
- You could help an elderly neighbour with their vegetable patch or show any stray nieces and nephews you might have how to recycle magazines into a bowl or even teach local young people how to ride a bike. Whatever your interest, the Volunteers’ Week website has all the listings of volunteering events happening in your area, helping you to get started doing something small but significant towards a carbon neutral world.
Katherine Hui is currently the Social site editor at Green Thing, a web-based public service in London that inspires people to lead greener lives through creative content.
Before this, she worked as the Development Manager at Social Innovation Camp, an organization that encourages people to use web and mobile-based technology to mobilise social change. She oversaw 300 ideas submission and helped build 20 prototypes – five of which have gone on to get further funding or investment.
Katherine’s came over to the UK form Canada in 2007 for an MSc program at the London School of Economics. Before arriving in London, she managed a small environmental start-up in Vancouver called the Canadian Climate Change Alliance.
Katherine is football mad. She is a loyal supporter of Arsenal FC, plays for Islington Borough Ladies FC and coaches for Gunners in Islington in her spare time. Her second favourite hobby is kite surfing and she can sometimes be found chasing the wind.
