Volunteering Can Improve Your Career Path

u oThe unemployment rate has been hovering around 10% in the United States for over a year now, and this is the worst unemployment we’ve seen in a few decades.  Young people are really feeling the effects of scarce job growth, because they have less experience, and it’s tough for them to convince employers to give them a chance when they don’t have the experience employers are looking for.  Many companies have cut back from hiring college graduates and less experienced staff, because they don’t have the extra money to lay on the line if those young, inexperienced workers don’t pan out.  But, that doesn’t mean that young people should give up or settle for jobs that they don’t want.  One great way to beef up your resume and look more attractive to employers is to volunteer.  Here are a few tips to help you utilize volunteering to improve the lives of others and your future career path.

Choose A Volunteer Trip Instead Of A Summer Job

Instead of making $7.00 an hour working at The Gap, try volunteering with a non-profit organization in another country, state, or city.  Summer jobs might put a little money in your pocket, but long-term volunteer trips can give you great experience in the workplace. 

Choose a Trip That Coincides With Your Job Concentration

For instance, if you want to be involved with project management in construction, volunteer with Habitat for Humanity and travel around the country planning and building houses for families around the country. 

Volunteering Doesn’t Need To Be Abroad

You don’t need to volunteer in another country to gain great experience and improve your resume.  You can volunteer in areas with a need for teachers and daycare if you’re looking to be a teacher.  You can also volunteer at the local YMCA if you’re looking to be involved in sports education or sports medicine. 

Take Your Volunteering To The Next Level

Don’t volunteer for yourself.  Do it for the people you’ll be helping, and the easiest way to make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons is to pick a volunteer opportunity that you’re passionate about.  The more passionate you are about the volunteer work, the more you’ll be willing to pour into it with a selfless attitude. 

It’s obvious that volunteering is a very rewarding activity, but remember that it is real experience that you shouldn’t overlook when interviewing for a job.  Employers love hearing about your volunteer experiences, and they’ll appreciate the fact that you stepped out of your comfort zone and helped people with a team player mentality.  Don’t volunteer just for a resume booster, but if you do, make sure you list it on your resume. 

How To Make The Most Out Of Your Volunteer Travel Experience

Volunteer travel is not about you or the people you travel with.  It’s about the people you’re going to help, and this is the mentality that we must bring with us when we travel on volunteer trips.  We’re volunteering our time to fulfill a need in another area.  However, one of the greatest rewards about volunteer travel are the memories and experiences we take away from the trips.  I think it’s really important to chronicle your experience and make sure you keep good records that you can keep forever.  Here are some ways you can do that.

• Start a blog.  This is great for the time leading up to your trip and the time immediately after your trip.  If you have friends and family financially supporting your trip, this is a great way to share your stories, photos, and videos.  You probably won’t have much access to the internet when you’re on your trip, so bring with you a Moleskin journal to keep track of notes and memories while on the trip. 
• Bring a good camera.   I usually don’t recommend bringing nice equipment with on a trip, but if you have a good camera, bring it with you.  You can get some great photos, both staged and candid, that will capture the moment perfectly.  Make sure you’re not too camera happy, though.  You’re there to help, not be a photographer.
• Bring a Flip video camera.  If you don’t want to carry around a big camera, consider buying a Flip camera for your trip.  It fits in your pocket, is easy to use, and it takes great video that’s easy to upload to YouTube and blogs when you get home.
• Make A Scrapbook.  If you’re crafty, make a traditional scrapbook, but if you’re not, create one digitally by using a service like Snap Fish or for Mac users, use the photo book feature on iPhoto. 
• Ask for personal souvenirs.  Ask the people you meet on your trip and/or the people you work with for something small of theirs that will help you remember them.  These are the most important souvenirs, and you won’t need to spend money on cheesy souvenirs. 

Volunteer travel is a very different experience.  You’re traveling somewhere out of your comfort zone to help others, and it’s an experience that you don’t want to forget.  Journaling and collecting pieces of memories are very important to the voluntourism experience.

How To Raise Funds For a Volunteer Travel Trip

There are thousand of volunteer travel opportunities in the United States and throughout the world.  I’ve been on several trips with my church when I was younger.  We visited the Bahamas, Ecuador, Mexico, and West Virginia.  Some of my favorite travel memories are from these trips, because I went to help and serve others, not just to have a good time.  The great thing about volunteer travel is that even though you aren’t sipping pina coladas on the side of the pool, you can still have a great time and build lasting relationships with the people you got on the trip with.  For every trip that I went on,  I only paid a portion of the cost to travel, because I raised the funds for the trip.  You’d be surprised at how willing the people closest to you will help support you financially for a volunteer travel trip.  Here are a few ways that you can raise funds for your trip:

Friends and Family

Make a list of your closest friends and family members, then write a personalized letter to each person on the list describing what you will be doing, who you’ll be serving, and how much you need to raise for the trip.  Personalized letters are always the most effective, because that person feels more important that you took the time to let them know about your trip. 

Have a Garage Sale

Ask your neighbors, friends, and family if they have anything they’d like to donate to you to be sold in a garage sale.  Let them know that all of the proceeds from the garage sale will go towards your trip.  If you receive a generous donation that’s worth a lot of money, you may want to try to sell it on Craigslist or eBay first.

Start a Blog or Facebook Page

Start a blog or Facebook page and chronicle your preparation for the trip and after the trip, post photos and write stories about your trip.  If a family member or friend donates towards your trip, they’ll appreciate you updating them about the trip.  You can easily set up a Paypal account and place a “Donate Now” on a blog or Facebook page so friends, co-workers, and family members can easily donate towards your trip by paying online. 

Ask Local Businesses

Local businesses are more generous than you may think, plus their donations are tax deductible for them.  Create a nice looking flyer and visit some local business owners.  You never know, they might donate towards your trip if it’s a cause they are interested in.

Fundraising can be a tough thing to do, but try to overcome your fear and shyness to ask for money.  Most people don’t mind being asked for money if it’s done in a professional manner and it’s for a good cause.  Remember, you can always ask for non-monetary donations that you can sell.  Part of the experience of volunteer travel is getting the entire community to contribute towards a common goal or trip.  Don’t be afraid to ask, because you just never know how generous someone is willing to be. 

Teens Get 'Hooked' On Volunteering - by Chereen Langrill
Article from the Idaho Statesman - 5 boys find they can make a real difference in just 5 hours a monthMore... (Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:43:00 GMT)

Why Participate in Volunteer Travel?
There are many reasons to give of your time and effort on your next trip. But it usually not the serivce that you provide that has the greatest impact: it is the effect it has on you.More... (Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:55:00 GMT)

A Volunteer Travel Program

The Volunteer Travel Hub by RezHub.com is a simple way to enjoy a volunteer vacation, without having to devote your entire holiday and budget to the charity.  RezHub.com's volunteer travel program is simple: use a small portion of your upcoming vacation to volunteer in the city to which you are traveling.

So, if you are traveling to San Francisco, use the Volunteer Match search form to look for Volunteer Opportunities in San Francisco during your time there.  You might find an opportunity to spend a day working with the local sea lions!

Article Originally Written By: Melissa Evans

Volunteer Vacations are Rewarding

Taking a yearly vacation has become almost a right of the American worker, so for these workers, it can be a difficult task to convince them that they should be volunteering on their vacation.

The most common objections to volunteering on vacation is that travelers do not want to give up their entire hard earned vacation time to volunteer activities or they cannot afford to pay to volunteer.  The Volunteer Travel Hub by RezHub.com has a solution for both: Bite-Sized Volunteer Opportunities.  With Bite-Sized volunteering, travelers are only committing a day or a portion of a day of their vacation to volunteer activities (unless they would like to commit more).  And, most of these opportunities do not require a financial commitment, just in terms of time.

Article Originally Written By: Melissa Evans

RezHub.com Asks Travelers To Take One Day To Change The World

Voluntourism trips or volunteer vacations are often related to extended stays in remote destinations, wearing hefty price tags. With such high barriers surrounding these trips, many travelers consider volunteer vacations simply out of reach.  In an effort to make voluntourism available to everyone traveling within the United States, RezHub.com has launched the Volunteer Travel Hub.

The Volunteer Travel Hub is a place where travelers can find free, short-term volunteer opportunities across the country. These “bite-sized” volunteer opportunities can be as short as a few hours, and are available in over 25 interest areas to help people reconnect with the issues they’re passionate about. The Volunteer Travel Hub is powered by VolunteerMatch, the Web’s leading volunteer matching network with over 58,000 participating organizations.

Since its launch last September RezHub.com has been on a mission to help customers feel good about travel. The newest addition to the RezHub family, the Volunteer Travel Hub, asks “What better way to feel good about travel than to get involved with something that inspires you?”

The Volunteer Travel Hub website offers travelers the benefits of a volunteer vacation without the usual extremes involved. Their motto, “It Takes One Day to Change the World,” serves as both an inspiration and a challenge to travelers. “In the spirit of our Green Travel Hub, we created the site to show people that it’s the small changes that really add up,” explains Melissa Evans, marketing director for RezHub.com. “If just a fraction of the millions of people traveling in the United States each year spent one day of their vacation volunteering, what a difference we could make.”

The bite-sized volunteer opportunities are intended to be combined with leisure vacations, business trips or any other travel arrangements. While discovering and participating in the bite-sized volunteer opportunities is free, the travel arrangements surrounding them are the responsibility of the traveler.  Simply booking a trip at the Volunteer Travel Hub will help make a difference: RezHub.com will donate 20% of the profits from every trip booked at the Volunteer Travel Hub directly to VolunteerMatch to help good people and good causes to connect.

Please consider the environment before printing this press release.         

About VolunteerMatch:  VolunteerMatch is a national nonprofit dedicated to helping everyone find a great place to volunteer. Its award-winning online service, located at www.volunteermatch.org, makes it easy to find local volunteer opportunities or recruit qualified volunteers. The VolunteerMatch network regularly welcomes more than 125,000 visitors each week and has become the preferred volunteer matching Web service for tens of thousands of participating nonprofits across the country and #1 search result for “volunteer” on Google and Yahoo!. The organization is committed to building world-class Internet applications that bring our communities closer together, expand the capacity of civil society, and encourage a culture of individual empowerment and participation.

Article Originally Written By: Melissa Evans

What is Bite-Sized Volunteer Travel?

If you’ve ever spent any time looking into volunteer travel or voluntolurism, you’ve probably found that volunteer vacations usually involve a lot of money and a lot of time.  The experience of a volunteer vacations is surely priceless but unfortunately, not all of us are able to take the time from work or the money from savings to actually go and lend a hand.  But just because we can’t spend 3 weeks and 3 grand to go over to Africa and help rebuild a village, it doesn’t mean we can’t make a difference as a voluntourist!  We’ve introduced bite-sized volunteer travel, one day volunteer opportunities right here in the US that are FREE to participate in!  We partnered with VolunteerMatch to show the world that there are volunteer opportunities all across THIS country that are available to anyone, regardless of the amount of time or money they have to give during their trip. 

In the spirit of our Green Travel Hub, we want people to know that you don’t have to go to extremes to make a difference and every little bit really does add up.  Imagine the billion people who travel the world each year spending just one day of their vacation volunteering!  It truly does take just one day to change the world. 

Bite-sized volunteer opportunities are available in categories ranging from politics to civil rights to the homeless to helping animals.  What better time to reconnect with something you are passionate about than while you’re on vacation?  Vacations are one of the only times that we actually have free time that we can spend doing something we love.  Volunteering is a way to bond with your family, plan a day of your trip, have fun, learn, and give back.  Check out our Volunteer Opportunity Search to start planning your day as a Voluntourist.

Some Bite-Sized Ideas...

Spend 3 Hours Helping the Hope Foundation for the Homeless at a fundraiser.

Spend a day walking shelter dogs at the Orange County Animal Services.

Help out in many areas at the Childerens Art Festival.

Spend a day at a senior center talking with the elderly.

Read to a class of childeren.

Article Originally Written By: Melissa Evans

Watch Go Live Give
Go Live Give is a green travel show that encourages a healthy lifestyle of eco-friendly vacationing, voluntourism and social responsibility. This original concept for Go Live Give originated out of the dedicated work of Maria Warman (host) and Kim Rowe (producer), two passionate individuals who share a love for travel, healthy living and giving back.More... (Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:36:00 GMT)