Volunteering at grass roots levels gives you a great satisfaction in that you know your small efforts has reached and helped someone in need. Whether it be, standing behind a counter selling some quick bites or just spending a few minutes with someone in need of company, there are so many life long traits and attributes that you pick up that you may not even realise.
The skills you pick up not only help your causes, but they also go a long way in your professional journey.
Here are 3 of the most important benefits I have come to realise about getting into grass roots charities and doing good for the people early on.
1. Social skills
Without doubt, it is one of the first skills you pick up in volunteering that goes a long way. Talking and engaging with people makes it so much easier to be able to progress in your career. It opens up new opportunities and gets you prepared for various situations. More likely than not, as a volunteer, you get the opportunity to work directly with a diverse range of people. Over a period of time, you learn to work and communicate with the common person to senior people within organisations, and funding bodies.
I've been extremely lucky in being able to start of with working with disadvantaged people and communicating with them (where with many I don't share a common language). Whilst volunteering for Sri Om Foundation passionately, it instilled confidence in me to speak with members of Parliament, business leaders and the general public about various topics and our cause.
After all this, starting in a professional career and dealing with people had been made all the simpler.
2. Up skill and using the knowledge
As you spend more and more time with your cause, you will always get the flexibility and opportunity to work in things you always want. Always remember, as a volunteer, your skills are always so much more valuable to a charity organisation who have little pockets and big hearts. The more you can share your knowledge and expertise for the cause, the quicker the cause can come up and provide help to more than ever!
Whether it's IT, accounting, legal, sales or whatever, there is always bound to be ways to bring in and implement your thoughts into the organisation. Best part is, you can get the opportunity to do it your way and learn new things and implement it in ways you not had a chance to. The flow on effect is you can use them in your day to day work life to help your career. Who knows where these skills may lead you on your journey?
Being a techy and enjoying all things Software, I was really privileged to implement so many software and cloud based tools well before I got to even learn about them in my work life (you can read up about salesforce for Sri Om here). With so many tools that are free for charities, there was really no limits for be to try, explore and settle in on making it part of the organisation. I also got the opportunity to work with other small communities and organisations and shared my skills to show them how to use technology for their work similar to how it was impelmented at Sri Om.
And offcourse, there is so much satisfaction in seeing what you implemented being used and helping out the cause and reaching new heights.
3. Becoming a leader
Leadership skills do not come natural to all and can take years of experience, successes and deffinately failures. Working with charities alongside your professional career, can really make inroads into what you need to do to becoming a leader.
When you look at the history of a charity, almost all of them started because someone wanted to make a change to this world. They had a vision, they had a goal and were the inspiration to get others to lend their hands. They were naultural leaders and have positive outlook of life, highly devotional to their cause and do not worry or are challenged by what hurdles lie ahead.
The skills of a leader and how they go about their business is something one should witness in their professional journey. You can get a lot of first hand experience of it when you join a small charity and seeing the face behind the organisation who is destined to make a change.
At Sri Om Foundation, our Chairperson, and guru, has a simple motto in "Humanity Leads to Divinity". That driving force is truly inspirational in keeping me going to keep bringing up the charity in any spare time that is available. Learning the history and struggles gone through in the past by the leader acts as motivation and has provided me the learning to help me one day become a leader. Overtime, I also was privileged enough to be part of the board which has helped me learn from other great people who have their own set of diverse leadership skills.
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