With all the talk around community involvement and volunteering I have been questioning for a while my own motivations for volunteering. It's such an everyday thing for me that when I am thinking about how to motivate people to volunteer more I am prone to asking "Why not volunteer".
A lot of my volunteering is with Girlguiding UK. As I have been a member since I became a Rainbow at age 5 a lot of the usual answers of "I don't have time to volunteer" etc just don't apply because I have always spent one evening a week at Guides so it doesn't seem a hardship. In fact, I think I would be pretty lost without it. Girlguiding afforded me such amazing opportunities as a child that it was important for me to stay involved as I got older to make sure other girls had the same opportunities.
Even so I have chosen to get involved with additional projects outside of my regular commitment to run a Guide unit, for 10-14 year olds, each week. For three years I was on the planning team for The Young Women's World Forum http://www.wagggsworld.org/en/YWWF. This event bought together young women from around the world to discuss and plan action on the UN MDGS. It was great when all our planning came to fruition and we got to meet all these incredible young women from around the globe. This was an brilliant opportunity which taught me a great deal. It has played a big part in my career decisions and I definitely feel that as well as putting a lot in to this project, I got an awful lot out.
Other volunteering I have been involved in has included campaigning for different causes and helping at various events - I enjoy these opportunities as I get to make new friends, learn about difference issues and go to cool events. So there's a lot of reasons why I volunteer - to champion causes I'm passionate about, to give back, to boost my CV, to do something productive with my time, to meet new people and because it makes me happy! I'd love to know other people's motivations for volunteering and whether different generations' motivations vary so let me know why you volunteer!
