Volunteer

Examples of Successful Group Projects

Administrative / Clerical	Food, Clothing, and Personal Items Drives	Interactive Volunteer-Client Projects
Outdoors / Preservation	Parties / Recreation	Restoration / Repair work

Administrative / Clerical

• Assembling first-aid kits for disaster or "blizzard boxes" for homebound citizens

• Working with families at-risk of becoming non-productive members of the community to help them fill out forms, apply for available assistance

• Pairing retirees to distribute agency literature to doctors' offices in the area

Food, Clothing, and Personal Items Drives

• Collecting canned goods and/or used clothing for clients of an agency

• A "back to school" drive, collecting school supplies for kids

• Sorting bulk food or clothing, such as far a community food bank

• Delivering food baskets to people with disabilities or to the frail elderly

• A children's book drive, tied in with an afternoon where volunteers read books to children

Interactive Volunteer-Client Projects

• A day of shadowing, in which adolescents follow employees around on the job, learning about the workplace

• A softball game between employees and ex-offenders--a chance for the volunteers to overcome stereotypes, and for the ex-offenders to feel valued, treated as people

Outdoors / Preservation

• Grounds beautification at a children's center

• Park clean up

• Removing litter from and pruning shrubs along a local highway

• Mobilizing 100 kids ages 3-18 from Boys and Girls Club to do anti-graffiti clean-up with local police

• Creating a community garden out of an abandoned lot

• Painting a mural on a blank agency wall, creating a year-round buzz about Day of Caring

• Painting and landscaping a children's playground

Parties / Recreation

• Creating a party for hospitalized children, seniors in nursing homes, or hospitalized veterans

• Taking children from a homeless shelter to a sporting event, supervising a softball game for kids at a facility for the disabled

• Taking adoptable animals from the humane society to a local shopping area, displaying them to shoppers and sharing information about the adoption process

• Creating a picnic for homebound seniors and their "just checking" telephone reassurance volunteers, giving them a chance to meet for the first time

• Organizing a "senior Olympics", with games like wheelchair volleyball

Restoration / Repair work

• Volunteers working alongside clients to rehabilitate a domestic violence shelter

• Putting a new roof on the YMCA

• Converting a garage into a women's center

• Painting cottages at a residential facility for youth

• Repairing the roof/repainting the house of an elderly person

• Spring cleaning for a day-care center--washing toys, carpets, walls

• Restoring an historic building

• Installing adaptive equipment to make accessible the home of a person with physical disabilities

• Painting the homes of low-income people
  

updated: May 20, 2008