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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.

4. Raise money for charity

Kathleen Galligan/Detroit Free Press/AP Photo
Dwayne Durant, 10 (l.) and Joshua Smith, 9, hold a lemonade and popcorn sale to benefit the City of Detroit, as Smith's mother Rhonda Smith, father Flynn Smith, and brother Nathanie Smith, 4 look on, July 30, 2012.

  • By Noelle Swan Staff writer

Donating money to charity is a component of many families' religious and ethical traditions. Regardless of how parents choose to donate, whether through religious tithing, or by dropping coins into the March of Dimes jar at the grocery counter, kids take notice.

While this sets an excellent example for children to follow, the full value of donating hard-earned money can best be appreciated after a hard day's work. Organizing and operating a fundraiser for a local organization, such as a school or baseball team, can help children to understand the work that goes into charity, beyond writing a check.

Organizing care packages for the troops, bake sales to raise funds for disaster relief organizations, and hosting silent auctions for community programs are all opportunities for families to get involved in charity work together, regardless of their financial situation. Also, organizing fundraisers can help foster creative, organizational, and math skills as kids help coordinate details for a fundraising event and pull together a final donation.

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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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