Volunteering To Give Back

November 5, 2009

Interview with Greg Baldwin, author of the book Spirit of Service: Your Daily Stimulus for Making a Difference

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Mike Carruthers:
Volunteering has lots of benefits but there’s some fascinating research about volunteering you not have heard about.

Greg Baldwin:
My favorite one is actually a study that’s done by a professor at Stanford that shows two things that are most likely to make you happy that you might not think would are dancing and volunteering.

Greg Baldwin

Greg Baldwin President of Volunteer Match and contributor to the book, Spirit of Service 

I think we greatly underestimate people’s desire to be helpful; it’s enormously satisfying to give back.

Every community has lots of places that need volunteers but interestingly a lot of volunteering experiences end in disappointment so before you dive in Greg has some advice for organizations and for volunteers.

Spend some time to think about what’s important to you and get involved with the organizations that speak to you. And on the nonprofit or on the organization side, be clear about your expectations and it’s better to have high expectations for your volunteers than low expectations – you’ll actually find better people and the best programs do that.

And if you need a little help figuring out where to volunteer there’s a website you can go to called spiritofservice365.com.

Go in and there’s a connection to volunteer match, you can put in your interest areas and your location and you actually begin to browse through opportunities in your local community for organizations that are looking for help.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.