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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.

5. Clean up the neighborhood

Jack Dempsey /AP Images for Boys & Girls Clubs of America
Colorado Boys & Girls Clubs members joined forces to help clean up Spring Canyon Community Park in Fort Collins, June 2, 2012.

  • By Noelle Swan Staff writer

The condition of local parks and playgrounds often set the tone for an entire neighborhood. However, the funding for maintaining these areas is frequently the first to be squeezed out of struggling municipalities' budgets. Many cities and towns enlist volunteer to maintain green spaces. Families can inquire about volunteer opportunities with the local parks and recreation department or search on the Keep America Beautiful website.

While group projects to paint a playground, or de-litter from a park can transform a neighborhood in an afternoon, it takes continued care from neighbors to keep the space safe and inviting.

Even small gestures, such as picking up a piece of trash from the playground or moving a fallen branch off of the sidewalk, can not only contribute to maintaining green spaces, but also help children see their own roles in caring for their communities. 

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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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