Year-round giving: 8 family volunteering opportunities

However your family contributes to the community, the experience is bound to bring you, your children, and your neighbors closer together. Here are 8 family-friendly volunteer opportunities.

2. Help serve at meal programs

Tony Avelar/Staff, File
Arcelia Garcia and her infant daughter Rubilia, center, and her son Melchor, 8, eat dinner at the Loaves and Fishes Family Kitchen in San Jose, Calif., Dec. 19, 2008.

Soup kitchens and meal programs through homeless shelters are often flooded with volunteers during the holiday season, but struggle to staff their kitchens throughout the rest of the year. Families willing to commit to a weekly shift can help these organizations spend fewer resources on staffing their facilities and create a routine for regular residents.

While young children are not typically suited for food service, this can be an ideal volunteer activity for families with teenagers.

Parents may want to scout out several meal programs before signing up their families. Some programs serve specific populations only, such as women, veterans, or seniors, while others are open to all populations combined.

Some programs seek to foster a somewhat intimate setting, like The Women's Lunch Place in Boston, where volunteers serve women and children breakfast and lunch at a table, while others strive to serve as many people as possible, like the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in New York City, which relies on 50-60 daily volunteers to serve 1,200 meals per day. 

Also, parents will want to be aware of whether or not meal services are considered "wet" – open to those who are intoxicated at the time of service – or not, in order to gauge age-appropriateness for their own children and to help prepare them for what they may encounter while serving.

The experience will be much more rewarding if families take care in finding the right programs where they can feel comfortable.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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