Volunteering - Yes or No? - Peter Varholak

Good evening mr. toastmaster, fellow toastmasters and most welcomed guests. Couple of years ago when I was in the army my commander asked "We need to clear the storage so I need three volunteers to do the job. Hands up who wants to do it..." I looked around myself and no hand was up. And my commander continued. Master Sergeant Farell with private Cage and private Wolf are volunteers. You will wait me 10am in front of my office.

Well in our life most of the time we have possibility to choose if we want to be volunteers. I will try to go through possitives and negatives of volunteering work and it´s up to you to decide if you want to do it.

1. Positives

a) Whatever you will do you will get more experience in that field. Often the experience will be new . You will maybe find your new interests or passions. Acording to one of the surveys you often find skill that you never realized you have.

b) You will give back to society and you will feel useful which is one of the human needs in the pyramid of needs that is pretty high. And while you will give you will also get. You will grow personaly. Your happiness, confidence and self esteem will jump through the roof. You will also see the world from different perspective.

c) Volunteering also has health benefits. One study notes that older women who volunteered in elementary school classrooms were more active than their peers who did not volunteer, but that activity boosted their metabolism and they were burning twice as many calories.

Physical activity and a positive outlook can also help reduce mortality rate, depression rate and blood pressure, other studies have shown.

2. Negatives

a) You will not be paid. Of course. That´s why we call it volunteering.

b) There are certainly more important things to do in life or more enjoyable activities than help people that you maybe even don´t know.

c) It can be emotionally and physically tiring - whether it is manual work, routine work or you are dealing with emotionaly challenging tasks it can drain you from your energy.

You can get frustrated. If in the volunteering work is poor organization, a lack of training and assignments that don't fit the volunteers' interests or skills. And you can become so involved in your particular cause that you become frustrated when others don't share your enthusiasm or when people don´t value what you do.

3. Does volunteer work influence our status?

I want to get you to attention two other aspects of volunteering:

a) that employers value volunteer work experience but only to some extent that you can see on the supporting material.

b) And second one that many of the volunteers already have high social status and don´t need to do volunteer work to further increase their status. They are highly educated and with high income already.

I hope I enlightened you with this problem if volunteer or not.