VOLUNTEERING AS A LAUNCH PAD
Be Part of the Engaged Minority
What a contradictory lot you young people are these days! Reporters, always keen to know what you’re thinking, say that you have a strong interest in helping the poor, engaging with the world, and working for social justice. The truth is, however, that many young people are far more interested in social media, video games, and earning money. This is only natural — asked to tick off your interests, you of course will choose “saving the environment” over “hoisting some brews” — even as you head off to the pub.
But you aren’t all like this: for a minority of young people, engagement with community is a crucial part of their lives. They have already been actively working, through their faith communities, Boy Scouts or Girl Guides, co-operatives, environmental groups, and other agencies to better the world. These young people — and the adults who inspire them — are the backbone of society, and critical to our pursuit of social justice in our time. It is to them, and to people who might like to be like them, that this chapter is addressed.
Volunteerism, though certainly praiseworthy, is not often seen as a strong element in career building. It is viewed as a time out, a separate activity that responds to the spiritual or social justice part of a person’s make-up, rather than as an integral part of personal or professional development. We wouldn’t want to downplay the humanitarian zeal and the concern for others that drives the volunteer impulse. At the same time, we want to emphasize that it can be extremely valuable to your career and your adult life.
Volunteer as a Way of Giving Something Back
Let’s dispense right away with the cynical approach to volunteerism as a means of puffing up your résumé. In the United States, where competition to get into the elite universities and colleges is intense, having impressive volunteer activities on your record can push your application closer to the top of the pile. Employers, too, love to see signs that there is a heart and soul behind the job experience and credentials
So, of course, a few enterprising individuals seize the opportunity to make some money from the altruism of others. There are actually companies that charge a fee to match students’ interests with volunteer opportunities. They realize that their clients want to be seen helping the disadvantaged, but without getting their hands dirty or dealing with really poor or sick people. These firms, shamefully, match clients with highly visible “volunteer” opportunities — good for Facebook pages and résumés but actually accomplishing very little. At their worst, these involve staying at a high-end hotel and making brief visits to an orphanage in a developing country or an AIDS hospice so that the client can be photographed “helping” the disadvantaged. Unimpressive, to be sure, and so transparent that this system is unlikely to fool people for long — though there seems to be money to be made in it. If you hire one of these outfits to make you look good, shame on you too.
We don’t want to be chauvinistic, a Canadian failing we often ascribe to the Americans, but we really are lucky to live in this country. By both historical and global standards, people in this country are among the richest in the world. Remember that there are more than a billion people who exist on less than $1 a day — less than the cost of a regular chocolate bar, or half the daily cost of your cellphone contract.
It’s hard to put a firm number on the relative wealth of Canadians, but let’s give it a go. Wealth is defined in many ways, most typically by individual and family income. By these standards, Canada has long ranked comfortably in the top ten countries in the world. But money in the pocket is only one measure of wealth. A wealthy person or wealthy society should be able to count on many non-monetary benefits. After all, what value is it to have stacks of money, but live in constant fear or being robbed or killed, as is the case in too many countries. So, a proper measure of “wealth” should include other factors — such as life expectancy, access to health care, educational opportunities, the status of women and children in society, safety within the home and the community, freedom from war and domestic strife, fresh water, non-polluted air, freedom from hunger, and decent shelter and clothing. By these standards, the average Canadian is probably in the top 2 percent of all of the people who have ever walked the face of the earth.
If you have any kind of social conscience, you will have to agree that our wealth carries at least some national and global obligations. (If you don’t, feel free to say “whatever” and skip the next few pages, but remember that you will be missing some real rewards.) People have, arguably, an obligation to give back — through their effort or their money — to the less advantaged among them. Many Canadians feel that the federal and provincial governments handle these responsibilities at the local, regional, and national level — funded, of course, from tax revenue paid by all Canadians — and that Ottawa discharges our global responsibilities through foreign aid contributions.
The uncomfortable fact is that, in terms of proportion of Gross Domestic Product devoted to foreign aid, Canada is fourteenth on the list of donor countries at 0.32 percent; the top countries, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, give more than 0.8 percent of GDP. Our commitment to foreign aid has never reached the internationally recommended target of 0.7 percent of GDP, and historically much of our aid has been tied to sales of Canadian foodstuffs and machinery — which of course is good for our economy. If it makes you feel better, the United States ranks considerably lower, donating about 0.19 percent of its GDP — not counting, of course, the country’s vast overseas military expenditures.
It falls on individual donors and volunteers to take up the slack. Canadians often respond generously, as they did following the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and the 2013 typhoon in the Philippines. We respond well to the campaigns run by the Red Cross, Oxfam International, Engineers Without Borders, Free the Children (a wonderful Canadian-led charity), Médicins sans Frontierès, and hundreds of other charities. We volunteer at food banks, attend fund-raising auctions and concerts, sponsor children in the developing world, and worry about the misuse of donated funds by crooked foreign governments. Canadians are reasonably generous people, although the largest share of our tax-deductible donations goes to our faith communities, which pass some of it along in the form of foreign aid.
Volunteer as a Way of Discovering Yourself
We see volunteerism as an opportunity for you to connect with people, communities, and countries much less advantaged than you may be. Volunteering carries a number of personal benefits. You will, through volunteering, develop a much greater understanding of and empathy for people who are poor, physically or mentally disabled, living with a personal or natural disaster, or otherwise struggling to make it through life. You may — particularly if you work directly with people in need (as opposed to through third-party organizations) — develop real compassion, acquired through thinking about the differences between your own life and the lives of other people who suffer through no direct fault of their own. Your appreciation for the complexities of the human condition will grow immensely if you make connections with people from other communities, countries, societies, and cultures.
By volunteering, you will test yourself in many difficult and complex ways. Dealing directly with hungry people is never easy, and it is much more challenging when you know that you will not face real privation in your life at home. The first exposure to real poverty is, for most people, a real eye-opener, upsetting their understanding of humanity and sparking a concern for social justice. Encountering wide-spread and deliberate environmental destruction, the brutal mistreatment of women, religious or cultural discrimination, massive slums, inadequate water supplies, and the like will have a profound impact on your world-view. Some of you will be unaffected and simply see your wealth and comfort as something you have earned or deserve by natural right. A significant number, though, are changed forever, and set forth on a life marked by concern for others.
Volunteering will probably not transform you into a humanitarian like Mother Teresa (who worked for decades with the poor and ill in India) or a social activist like Canada’s Stephen Lewis, who has been a world leader in the battle against HIV/AIDS. Not that it would be a bad thing if you became saint-like, of course — it’s just unlikely. At root, the fundamental benefit of volunteering for you is that it will make you confront yourself and draw attention to your assumptions about both your place in the world and the challenges facing the poor, the dispossessed, and the uncared for. As a bonus, it will set you apart from the swarm.
Volunteerism provides enormous opportunities for global exploration. You can work on a Habitat for Humanity project in your community, building homes for people who need basic shelter, or you can join a group working in Mozambique to build houses for women and children affected by HIV. Free the Children permits you to raise funds locally to support educational and health programs in the developing world. Craig and Marc Kielburger, founders of Free the Children, are brilliant and admirable examples of what Canadian young people can do. There are thousands of charities doing great work at the local, national, and international levels.
Katimavik and Cuso
A generation ago, Canada had a small and politically controversial attempt to prepare young people for a life of service called Katimavik (the word means “meeting place” in Inuktitut). Founded in 1977, Katimavik had good intentions but lacked effective management and eventually turned into a privately funded and much smaller undertaking. The government of Canada announced the withdrawal of federal funding in 2012, but as of 2013 Katimavik declared itself to be alive, fund-raising and planning on putting Canadians into the field as volunteers in the spring/summer of 2013. You can read about it at www.katimavik.org.
Perhaps a more familiar example to Canadians is CUSO, which was founded in 1961 as Canadian University Service Overseas, and now, as CUSO International, is part of a wider alliance of voluntary organizations that over the past fifty years has placed over 45,000 volunteers, about a third of them Canadian, in various countries overseas. CUSO currently has 350 volunteers working in twenty-seven developing countries for periods of between three months and two years. They particularly want people with skills that match their projects, and if you are interested, you should look at their website (cusointernational.org).
We want you to consider spending a few months or even a year or more volunteering before you go on to post-secondary education or into the workforce. Young people often feel real pressure to get on with life, only to head off into a field of endeavour for which they are ill suited. You are likely seventeen or eighteen years old. You are a young adult, probably with at least six decades of life ahead of you. Taking a year or two to help others is only a short detour from whatever path you choose. Volunteering can provide you with a life-changing perspective on the world, a way of placing your options and opportunities in a broader global context. People have been doing this for generations, heading off to help in Christian mission fields at home or overseas, joining international aid organizations to provide crisis assistance in times of natural or human disaster, or, to use a well-known American example, signing up for the Peace Corps and heading off to make the world a better place.
Of course, you can always help out in your home community or region. There is never a shortage of opportunities at seniors’ homes, elementary- and pre-schools, drop-in centres, agencies working with people living with mental and physical challenges, environmental organizations, and many, many others. You could easily put together a full slate of commitments without going more than a few kilometres from home, discovering opportunities to engage with local citizens and the community at large. To a degree that very few Canadian appreciate, this country runs substantially on volunteer labour, and you can do much worse than join the huge volunteer army that keeps Canada moving.
Make Sure the Commitment You Choose Is Right for You
You have to be careful in selecting your volunteer opportunity. Some people find it hard to see extreme poverty. Others find serious diseases upsetting. Many Canadians, raised with the uncrowded spaces and large expanses of this massive country, have trouble dealing with the huge, chaotic slums that surround major cities in the developing world.
You have to be honest about your comfort level with different cultures and communities. Canadian women, raised in the open and generally welcoming conditions in this country, can chafe at the restrictions governing their actions in fundamentalist regions and under oppressive regimes. There are many dangerous parts of the world — all of them desperately in need of volunteers and assistance — that would frighten even the bravest people. Be sensible about these things. Just imagine how your parents would react to hearing that you had decided to spend a year in Afghanistan or Yemen. You can volunteer without making a martyr of yourself or putting yourself at unnecessary risk.
Volunteer opportunities for you to consider
• Help out in a hospital, orphanage, or centre for children with disabilities
• Assist community-based political organizations
• Support training initiatives for dispossessed workers
• Work on agricultural projects, including local food security activities targeted at the urban poor
• Support children and families suffering from HIV/AIDS
• Teach English as a Second Language or assist in understaffed schools
• Volunteer with public health programs
• Help preserve and interpret historic sites
• Get involved in business development and micro-business activities
• Assist with youth sports and community cultural activities
• Help with environmental reclamation and conservation initiatives
• Participate in important local or international research projects
• Perform with and assist community arts organizations
• Help Habitat for Humanity complete building projects
• Support journalists and social activists with public awareness activities
Multiply the number of items on this list by the scores of countries urgently requiring assistance, many with hundreds of communities or rural areas. The world is not short of opportunities to help.
Remember that Volunteering Can Help Your Career
It’s not all self-sacrifice. There’s a practical benefit to volunteering. The first priority should always be the opportunity to help others. From start to finish, benefits to yourself should be secondary. But it’s a happy fact that properly undertaken volunteer activities can make a major contribution to your career possibilities. Admissions officers love to discover that a top student has a solid social conscience. Employers are more impressed with young people who have made a commitment to helping others than with those who spent their summers serving at McDonald’s or their gap year working as a retail clerk in the downtown mall — or even backpacking around Asia, though that can be a positive experience too (see chapter 8). At a simple level, therefore, volunteering looks good on future job applications.
The career-boosting benefits of volunteering go well beyond building your résumé, important as this can be. If you have selected your volunteer activities properly — working with the poor in Guatemala looks a great deal better than helping out at the high school graduation ceremonies for an elite, expensive private school — you will have told people evaluating your file a great deal about yourself. Your volunteer activities should have several of these characteristics: longer term (four months to a year), work is clearly humanitarian or related to environmental or social justice issues, in a different cultural setting, presenting personal challenges (physical, psychological, emotional, or cultural) and providing practical experience.
The last point is crucial. Eventually, when you get back to Canada, you will want a job, either right away or after some kind of post-secondary education or training. Picture an employer reviewing two résumés, both from young people with the same level of education: university, college, apprenticeship, or just high school. One stayed at home, had several part-time, low-skill jobs, and now wants a real job. The other spent a year in South America, developed Spanish language skills, and began as a teacher in an elementary school but ended up as the manager for the local food co-operative. Remember that, as an employer, you are looking for standard employability skills in your prospective workforce. Compare a volunteer and a non-volunteer in these categories: breadth of experience, organizational skills and experience, humanitarian qualities, confidence in speaking, evidence of work ethic, commitment to personal development, professionalism, international awareness, growth potential, openness, and creativity. Which one comes out on top?
This is not to say that local or national volunteer activity is without real merit. Indeed, a full-time local volunteer will likely stand out above the crowd of young people who have had stay-at-home, low-skill jobs. But from a career-building perspective, an international engagement grabs greater attention. Everyone from family members to admissions officers and future employers is impressed that you spent half a year in the favelas in Brazil, taught in an elementary school in Ghana, built flood-control systems in Sri Lanka, or supported a major conservation effort in Nicaragua. Supporting the local food bank, volunteering with a youth sports initiative, or visiting the elderly in a hospice are all valuable activities that reflect very well on you. They simply do not generate as much spontaneous interest as a long-term international engagement.
The most crucial element of volunteering is that it opens your eyes to your own strengths and weaknesses as well as to the opportunities and challenges of the modern world. Whether you volunteer in your home community, elsewhere in Canada, or in another country, you are going to expand your horizons, learn a great deal more about the world, and enhance your future employability.