Volunteer work: Where to start and what to be ready for
IF YOU WANT TO CHANGE WORK, but you have not yet decided what profession you would like to master if you want to wind down to the ends of the earth, but finances sing romances, if you take a pause between leaving the old position and entering a new one, if you are a philanthropist in your heart - you can become a volunteer. Especially in a crisis, working for food is not so bad.
What is volunteering and how does it happen?
Volunteering is a work that is carried out on a voluntary basis and does not imply a monetary reward. The exact date of the birth of such an approach is impossible to establish: formally, even one of our ancestors could be considered the first volunteer, who helped make a fire to his neighbor from a nearby cave, not expecting anything in return. If you approach the issue more formally, volunteering, or voluntary assistance to the needy, in Russia is rooted in the work of sisters of mercy, the creation of orphan schools, held at the expense of alms, the activities of doctors who worked for free in hospitals during numerous wars of the Russian empire, in activity of Timurovs and warriors. In the United States, the promotion of voluntary unpaid labor began in the days of Benjamin Franklin, when the first volunteer fire brigade was created in Philadelphia. The Americans began mass participation in volunteer work later thanks to the Red Cross.
Now there are many volunteer organizations around the world where you can work in exchange for room and board. You give your work and experience - you are fed for this and provide a place to sleep. Sometimes for volunteer work you can get some nice bonus like a ticket to a music concert or a "temporary loan" - the opportunity to engage in various activities for an hour like swimming or learning a foreign language. Some turn volunteering into a lifestyle, earning a little pocket money and moving between cheese farms, construction sites and schools where local children learn English.
Volunteering can be temporary and regular. Temporary volunteering is popular at events like the Olympic Games, Formula 1, various marathons. Eco- and educational projects, as a rule, also imply a defined, predetermined term of work with the organizers. At the same time, the volunteer has the opportunity to become a participant in the events and see the life of the project from the inside: you can, for example, come across Usain Bolt in slippers in the Olympic Village, look at the tires of a smoking car at the test drive, help turtles get to the ocean or harvest an orange oranges somewhere anything in the Spanish wilderness.
But if you want to be, for example, a clown doctor or a volunteer fund "Give Life" to work in a hospital, you need to be ready for regular work. It is preceded by selection and preliminary preparation, which can take from several weeks to several months.
Where to begin?
First you need to dream and honestly ask yourself what you want: to work for free at an unloved job is a dubious idea. Maybe in childhood you dreamed of becoming a clown and make children happy, or wanted to ride horses and care for them, but your parents forbade them? Or have you long wanted to work in Italy to speak Italian like Adriano Celentano? Or maybe you want to cross the oceans? Or do you want to learn how to grow potatoes and tomatoes or build houses, although only LEGO was collected in your life? Or are you bothered that there is rubbish lying around in a nearby park, and you would be happy to wave a rake on a subbotnik?
If the work "in the fields" is not your fad, you can try creative projects - for example, to work in museums (volunteers are looking for, for example, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Hermitage Museum, the N. Roerich Center-Museum and other galleries), at Russian and foreign festivals - music and film - and participate in other projects. Work for the soul there for all. By the way, some recruit to work in pairs, so you do not need to spend your holidays alone.
When you are scheduled enough, you can start taking action. It should be borne in mind that often at large-scale and popular events, where many people want to go (for example, at the Olympics, Burning Man, Oxford Film Fest), volunteers become only after selection, and you may also have to undergo training. In such cases, applications must be submitted strongly in advance - about six months or a year before the event: for example, recruiting for volunteer vacancies at the Rio Olympics began two years before the competition. The same rule applies to projects that require special skills - for example, special training is needed to work with people with disabilities. Plus, you need to set aside time for obtaining a visa and buying tickets - as a rule, you need to do this yourself.
If you want to volunteer abroad, you can find a project for yourself or contact aggregator sites that collect volunteer vacancies from around the world. In the second case, it’s worth saving up some money for the registration fee ($ 20-60), register for resources for volunteers and volunteers — for example, Workaway — visit the group more often, where travelers publish volunteer vacancies in Russia and around the world. Many projects have a Facebook page, through them you can also contact the organizers. For volunteer vacancies in Russia there is no special uniform platform yet. But at the same time, it’s easy to find a project: there are many national parks, farms, non-profit organizations that need volunteers.
At the same time, the volunteer has the opportunity to see the life of the project from the inside: for example, by chance meet Usain Bolt in home slippers in the Olympic Village
For overseas jobs you should write a detailed resume in English, where you can talk about your talents, and also explain why you want to work in a particular project. As a rule, according to the job description, you can understand what is expected of you - use it. In addition, drafting a resume will help you better understand what you want from work and what you are willing to share with others. Work on oneself begins with goal setting, like a theater with a hanger.
After all these simple manipulations, you can send requests to your favorite projects. Do not hesitate to ask about the working and living conditions, find out whether you need to bring with you special things like raincoats, gloves, work clothes (not in all projects the organizers are ready to provide them). If you sent a request and no one answered within ten days, you can send it again and try to contact the organizers through other channels - via Facebook, Skype or the form on the site. If there is no response from the organizers within three weeks or a month, most likely it will not be. It's not scary: with the thought that the project has lost an excellent opportunity to work with you, look for other programs.
After you arrange your arrival date with the organizers, you can take tickets and apply for a visa if you need it. As a rule, they do not help with visas and tickets, but a regular tourist visa for volunteer work is quite enough.
If you are worried about security, you are doing the right thing. There are no guarantees that everything will be fine, systems with a selection of volunteer vacancies are not responsible if something happens to the volunteer or the organizer. We will not arrange a panic, just remind you of the elementary security measures that are needed not only for volunteering, but also for any single trip. Study the reviews of other volunteers about the project, look for information about the organizers on the network. Never transfer funds that are not specified in the terms of volunteering to the project organizers. Think over plan "B" if you want to leave earlier. Trust your gut feeling is very important. Some volunteers do not agree to participate in the project, if at the time of the negotiations they do not feel credible to the organizers or if there is no information about the project in the network, it does not have a website, and the organizer in the correspondence asks strange questions. Give your family and friends the address and name of the project, get in touch. In general, keep the powder dry. You can read more about the instructions for volunteers and security measures on Workaway and Couchsurfing websites - here they know how to strike a balance between trust in peace and common sense.
What to expect from volunteer work?
If under the terms of the project you are not the only volunteer, get ready to communicate a lot - and with a variety of people. In ecosettlements, for example, you can meet people with experience in large corporations who have exchanged office and management of subordinates to produce cheese in the village silence, retirees who do not want to spend their days in four walls in a bustling city, students looking for alternative ways of life, single mothers wishing to raise children in harmony with nature, and just eternal travelers, wandering from one project to another. You can see for yourself how many different ways to live life exist on this planet.
Volunteering allows you to get work experience outside the office and life outside the apartment. You can temporarily reincarnate as a farmer, conservationist, baker, logger, guide, restaurateur, medic, teacher. You will have the opportunity to live on the ocean, in the jungle, in the permafrost or in the steppes, live in a tent, a yurt, a house with history or a bungalow, sleep in a hammock or even in the open air - it's like a children's camp, only for adults.
If you have to work with the land, build or care for animals, be prepared for physical exertion. Collecting hay or brushwood, digging the ground, taking care of the paths in national parks are not the easiest, but very grateful things, and most importantly, the result of labor is visible immediately, and you feel that you have contributed to positive changes. Do not forget to stretch.
Be prepared to learn something new about yourself. You may find yourself in the talent of a baker or find out that you have an "easy hand" when you plant trees. You may like to milk the cows and wash in the mornings in the mountain river, you may want to become an oceanologist, polar explorer, an agronomist or a builder, study marine business or a foreign language. This knowledge of yourself is impossible to obtain simply by reading books about the profession and dreaming about a job change.
You will be able to live outside the commodity-money-commodity system, engage not only professional but also personal qualities, such as mutual aid and compassion, in your work.
Volunteering again "humanizes" work. The Gallup Institute has developed a staff motivation system based on a detailed study of the talents of employees who have to work together, which allows them to be used most effectively. Volunteers can learn more about their talents without qualifying for a large corporation team.
You will be able to live outside the commodity-money-commodity system, engage not only professional but also personal qualities, such as mutual aid and compassion, in your work. Monetary motivation has become familiar to us, because the experience of living outside it can be especially valuable. You will work without wages and profits, but you will not have to spend money on transportation, dinners in office canteens or restaurants, things that fit the dress code and the status you occupy on the public ladder.
Volunteers also realize in their work a valuable desire to be kind, to see in their volunteer colleague first of all a person, and not a function that he performs at work. In volunteer projects, company directors, project managers, legal assistants, retirees, students and doctors can lay the foundation for the future school building together, and nobody cares about who achieved what in ordinary life.
Difficulties of volunteer work
Do not wait for comfortable conditions - perhaps you will live in a room that you don’t like, eat unusual food, get up early, do black work, someone from other volunteers may annoy you. It is not always possible to understand all the nuances of working, living and participating in a project before it starts, therefore if you do not wait for the heavenly conditions, it will be easier to cope with the discomfort.
You need to be prepared for the fact that you will have less personal space and will have to share your life with other volunteers. Someone will not be easy to live in a room with strangers of different ages, nationalities, religions and with different expectations from life. There are also conflicts - especially if the volunteers remain in the project for a long time. Routine, fatigue and difference in goals can lead to disagreements when you have to defend your opinion. This happens in any team, and it is impossible and not necessary to protect oneself from conflicts: in any case, the experience of communicating with different people will be beneficial. And you will surely find out more about yourself: you will either like life in a commune, or you will appreciate more privacy.
You should not expect that someone will organize your free time - most likely, you will be left to yourself, unless the organizers do not include excursions, yoga classes and cookery courses as bonuses.
In the case of volunteering, it is better not to have high expectations - then all the failures and surprises that are sure to arise will be easier to survive, and there will be more joy from the good moments of the project. If you are ready for adventure and new experience - a backpack behind your back and go! If volunteering does not fit into your lifestyle, you most likely already read other material.
Photo:Wikimedia Commons, Flickr (1, 2, 3, 4)
