Alex on Emerald City – Volunteering for a Bike Org

I wrote a piece for Emerald City yesterday about volunteering for a local bike advocacy organization. I boiled it down to five orgs and one event: CICLE, the Bike Oven, the Bicycle Kitchen, Bikerowave, LACBC, and the Bicycle Film Festival. BTW, if you want to get involved in bike activism there are a T O N of other options, and I’ll summarize some of them in next weeks post. One option, for example, is to guest post for Westside BikeSIDE. I’ll be having more and more guest posts here, so if you have something about bikes you’d like to share, email me at alexcthompson@gmail.com and we’ll talk. Everyone has wonderful stories to share, and I am a billion percent supportive of that.

When it comes to volunteering many people think you should walk to the nearest non-profit and declare “use me!” I disagree. I devoted a one thousand words to volunteering because I don’t think it’s a simple act. It’s tough to figure out the best place to put your effort:

Volunteering is simple, right? You just go to the organization you choose to volunteer for, say “Here I am,” and they give you a stack of envelopes to lick. I disagree. Volunteering is a complex and often creative act.

Here’s one reason it’s not a simple act:

We volunteer our free time and excess energy, so it is important that whatever you choose to do as a volunteer is rewarding. If not, you won’t volunteer for very long, and that’s no good for anyone. How much energy and time would you like to devote? If you over-commit you won’t be very effective, and if you volunteer for a high-energy task when you’re tired, you won’t be of much help to the organization. Conversely, if you have a lot of energy to volunteer, and you get stuck licking envelopes, you’ll be bored to death.

It’s true – you need to volunteer for a task which is rewarding for you, and a good fit in terms of energy levels. This is a rule for activism in general – if you’re going to be an activist on a volunteer basis make sure that it’s rewarding. Make sure that it’s a positive in your personal life. If not you won’t last long, or your discomfort will carry over into your activism, and drag it down. That doesn’t mean you should avoid the thankless tasks – collating and copying and cleaning chains. It means you should balance those tasks with FUN. Like these two: