How Do You Volunteer Professional Services? 366
keefus_a writes "My wife and I usually take a week long vacation in the Spring and I tossed out the idea of volunteering abroad. Neither of us has a problem with doing manual labor, or whatever task is needed. However, I thought it might be of some value, and substantially more rewarding than our daily grind, if we could volunteer our professional services (I'm a network guy and my wife has a master's degree in counseling). The problem is that I haven't found any resources for doing so on a short-term basis. So I ask Slashdot. Has anyone ever done short-term volunteer work in your professional field? What organization did you contact? Or are we better off donating money to a particular cause and just working on a tan?"
Impossible to do with organization (Score:4, Interesting)
just say no (Score:2, Interesting)
That's just crazy. Take a vacation, relax, enjoy life. There's plenty of time (51 weeks a year to be exact) that you can toil away at that grindstone.
Trust me, you (and your emotional/physical/mental well being) will thank me.
Easy... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yet a 3rd choice...
Keep your money for yourself, and go somewhere NICE for a tan.
Get a tan (Score:5, Interesting)
I like the one suggestion above, to just go and ask. Few organizations are as mired in bureaucracy as the head offices of NGOs. It's the field offices that may be able to come up with some work on the spot.
Short of that, get a tan. Sorry, but there's no such thing as "intellectual day labour" - most jobs that use education require you to mesh in with a team, with an office environment, with a set of clients and problems. It takes a week, minimum, often a month, to be productive enough to pay back the hours spent showing you around, introducing you, briefing you.
If you want a great story about the fun of dealing with NGOs, try this 3-screen Atlantic article on the lady who had the terrific idea of a co-op of Afghan farmers that would produce essential oil from their pomegranates for use by "The Body Shop" and others for high-end soaps. It involved purchasing, at first, a single hand-cranked seed-oil press.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/afghans [theatlantic.com]
My favourite bit on page 2 - asked to fill in a 14-screen spreadsheet with numbers on "production coefficients", the "equipment procurement, loan-repayment summaries, sales figures, labor costs, packaging and shipping costs, and cash-flow statements. It took me two weeks, full-time, just to fill in the cells with real numbers. And I have a master's degree from a U.S. university. I began to wonder how Afghan entrepreneurs would ever be able to negotiate such requirements." Presenting it to them at the end of the two weeks, she's told, the "...agribusiness team greeted the spreadsheet with a snort. "We don't need anything like that. He just loves to cook up these spreadsheets," they remarked of their colleague."
Funny you should ask... (Score:2, Interesting)
RedCross is a great place to start (Score:2, Interesting)
I've done volunteer work through the RedCross. http://www.redcross.org/ [redcross.org] Like others have mentioned if you are just wanting to help a week at best you'll be digging ditches or sorting donations. Small things like sponsoring a blood drive or working the refreshment stands at a blood drive is very helpful and can be done short term.
They've got chapters all over the world so they may be able to hook you up with a foreign "office" for something short term. They are a great group to volunteer with year round and they give you a ton of options so you can find something that fits in your life.
You may also want to try http://www.volunteermatch.org/ [volunteermatch.org] I've never used them, but RedCross uses them as the backend for their volunteer search pages.
Re:Church (Score:3, Interesting)
You're going to find bias anywhere you try to volunteer, church or otherwise. I'd advise not to volunteer at a Christian church that showed bias, as the preacher is likely a wolf in sheep's clothing (Pat Robertson has converted more Christians to athiesm than all the athiests at slashdot).
Take homosexuality, for instance. How many clean shaven preachers preach against homosexuality, when the Bible says not to make yourself look like a woman and facial hair is a secondary sexual characteristic? Pat Robertson is guilty of this sin. The truth is, God loves homosexuals as much as he loves anyone. None of us are perfect, and all are forgiven. A judgemental person is NOT a good Christian and any judgemental preacher is not one you should follow, or work for.
Re:with all due respect (Score:3, Interesting)
And if real world shrinks were anything like the ones you see on TV, you'd have a point.
I agree. I was not trying to poke fun at the role of a professional counsellor (goodness knows I have benefitted from counselling!). The idea of someone being able to provide quick and effective mental health assistance at some international/interplanetary disaster site for a week a year just reminded me of the TV heroine image of Troi.
Yes, an academic involved in studying mental health in disaster situations might suddenly be in demand for a week, but your general counsellor will not be. Perhaps there is a counsellor equivalent of ARES as mentioned in this post [slashdot.org]?
Desktop/network support for women's health clinics (Score:4, Interesting)
As a woman who can remember the dark days before Roe when pregnant girls "disappeared" out of schools and thousands of desperate women died every year from backalley and coathanger abortions, I know I have to do my part to help abortion rights. Since I'm not a medical professional and can't perform free abortion services myself, I do the next best thing and donate my time at local Planned Parenthood and private abortion clinics. The doctors, nurses and staff are all wonderful, welcoming people, but most of them know next to nothing about computers because the average abortionist is over 60 years old. Increased reporting requirements, insurance mandates, and electronic records means that computers are more important than ever and small abortion clinics have trouble even keeping their computers and networks running and can't afford expensive consultants and medical software.
All this means that you wouldn't believe the smiles on the faces of abortion clinics staffs when I volunteer at their offices. My latest deal is saving them money on software by installing open source wherever I can. I live in a mid-sized mid-western city, and recently redid a local Planned Parenthood network. I replaced their hokey Netgear router with an old Pentium II beige box running OpenBSD 3.3 as a firewall (BEST release of ANY OS for a firewall, IMHO), and I even reinstalled the secretary's Windows 98 PC with Ubuntu 9.04 and OpenOffice and told her it was Windows Vista. (HA!)
So if you want to put your skills to work for the greater good, call your local abortion clinic and tell them you can help with their computers. You won't regret it.
Re:Church (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're punished in Hell for your sins, how is that Forgiveness in any way, shape, or form?
Re:Have a vacation AND do something for people (Score:1, Interesting)
This is a very excellent point of view and I agree completely. Even if you are traveling in the US, it's nice to be a patron of a small business (a local B&B for instance) instead of getting a room at the local mariott. But this is a great point on many levels.
Pick a spot, especially if you know anyone in the area you could be visiting, and try to find a small business who can't afford to advertise. It's gonna be some research work, but you'll find everything you need to have an awesome vacation and you'll not only get the most bang for your buck but you'll feel good about it knowing you may have connected with a real person struggling to run their business.
There was a small "hostel" that was owned by a very nice family, you could tell it was just their house, be it an oversized one, turned into a hostel. It was great. Best service we've ever had and they sure didn't mind providing it because we sure didn't mind paying for it. In the end we saved money but would love to make it a tradition and be recurring guests.
Living in the NGO captital of the World, Kathmandu (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Doing service brings joy in life! (Score:3, Interesting)
Given the current economic structure in the US how much of the average vacation expenditure do you really think goes back into the economy?! Do you really going to wallmart and to stock up for your vacation (buying goods made in china) and then then filling your non-American car with gas and taking off for a week to stay at holiday inn and sip on Budweiser puts money back into the US economy, you might want to find out where those dollars are really going....
Re:with all due respect (Score:2, Interesting)
People were able to call their relatives and send emails to let people know that they were alive and arrange to be reunited with separated family members. You can't imagine what it's like to see a mother who was separated from her kids when they were pulled off a roof by boats, when she finally finds out where they are and that they are OK.
Remember those voucher credit cards that were handed out to help people buy basic necessities? Intel, Cisco, and Avaya provided the infrastructure, equipment and volunteers to issue those cards.
One interesting side story: When we arrived in the Baton Rouge fairgrounds with our boxes of networking equipment, we found that there was already a trailer set up with network access for people to use. It turns out that a Good Samaritan had wandered to the fairgrounds to see if he could help, and noticed there wasn't any networking infrastructure. He called the tech support line for his ISP, and asked if the ISP could help out. The ISP tech support guy sent the request up his chain (in the middle of the night), and within a couple of hours the ISP had live networking available at the fairgrounds. The Good Samaritan brought some computers from home, and set up a table with computers available for use. When newscrews arrived later, they were able to just piggyback on the network connection. By the time we arrived, the network was running smoothly and with plenty of donated computers. Spontaneous networking!
Unfortunately, the food situation in Baton Rouge wasn't quite as smooth... the big chain restaurant that had received the order for dinner for several thousand people decided not to accept the Red Cross money, but didn't bother to let the Red Cross know. The Red Cross volunteers started pooling their credit cards and money to figure out how to pay for dinner for all the hungry people. Talk about caring people...
Red Cross Disaster Relief people are wonderful. If you want to be one, google for Red Cross Disaster Relief. When we were in Montgomery Alabama doing our networking, there were volunteers arriving by the busload. Most had only a backpack of personal possessions (soap, toothbrush, change of clothes, etc). These people weren't there for the money (it's volunteer labor), or the glory. It's hot sweaty work, dealing with stressed out displaced people, some of whom are very angry and frustrated. The volunteers were there to help out.
I'm glad I got the chance to help after Katrina, and I hope to be able to volunteer again in the future.
Thank You to Intel, Cisco, and Avaya for allowing us employees the opportunity to volunteer.
Yeah, there's tons of stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
I was hoping for something at a lower IQ level.
If you're going to be reading Ayn Rand, then you're headed in the right direction. It's a philosophy perfectly suited to people with little experience with reality, like seventeen-year-old boys and pampered heiresses.
The Cliff Notes version? She begins with a high-minded "Wouldn't it be great if we were all free and responsible?" and the entirely reasonable "The mob should not intrude on the rights of the individual." You then have to sit through endless dreary variations of "The Little Red Hen." It eventually boils down to "Frack you, I got mine." and a childish cry of "Mine! Mine! Mine! Don't Wanna!"
The Randians love to scrunch their eyes, put their fingers in their ears, chant at the top of their lungs and stamp their feet when anyone points out that eventually, at the end of the day, you have to work and get along with other people. We're all standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before, and there's no such thing as a truly "self-made man."
Not all sad, lonely, miserable bastards are Objectivists, but from what I've seen, all Objectivists are sad, lonely, miserable bastards.
Taking Rand or Nietzsche seriously is pretty much guaranteed to ruin your life.