I Participate

Hello!

Everyone is very busy during December and volunteering is not always high on our priority lists.  We get busy with friends and family, celebrating the holiday season, and other interests get delayed.  Now, however, is a great chance to start laying groundwork that can help you start the new year ready to help others in your community. 

One of the easiest ways to get started is to go to a website called iparticipate.org.  This is a site with national scope and was created and is maintained by the Entertainment Industry Foundation.  You can see how celebrities like Faith Hill, Gwenyth Paltrow and John Bon Jovi are making the world a better place through volunteerism.  And more importantly, on the home page you will see seven speed buttons that will take you to different causes.  They are:  The Movement, Well-Being, Education and Children, Community Health, Environment Conservation, Financial Security and Support for Military Families.  Click one of them and you be directed to a page that contains information on national, non-profit organizations that do great work and provide opportunities for involvement. 

For instance, under the Environment Conservation page you will find an organization called Alliance for Community Trees.  This is a organization helps to protect community forests by planting trees in cities all over the country.  According to the site, ACT members have planted over 7.8 million trees and engaged more than 450,000 volunteers!  There are places on that page to get become a friend of ACT and join The Neighborwoods Network.  And there are other sites on this page that serve this cause as well

But the best part of the site is that is has a local tie in.  Once you're at the homepage, the site knows your physical location and provides a search box to help locate volunteer organizations that need your help now.  I live on Clearwater Beach and when I typed the word "Nature" into the search box, I got several pages of organizations in the Clearwater area that support the conservation cause.  One was Adopt-a-Park.  They look for businesses and individuals to help work with the Clearwater City Parks Department to revitalize parks in my neighborhood.  They will provide the materials, volunteers provide sweat equity.  Others included docent opportunities at Booker Creek Park and Weedon Island Preserve. 

I find this to be a very helpful site and I'm sure it can help you start a volunteer journey or enhance the efforts you already have underway.  The important thing is find a cause that you are passionate about, find an organization that supports that cause and get involved in some way. 

Starting next time, I'm going to showcase a local organization that does great work to help our community and ways you can get involved.  We are fortunate to live in a wonderful place like Tampa, St. Petersburg and the surrounding Bay Area.  It provides us with such a great quality of life and there is no better time than now to start giving back.