Make a Difference: Why Social Service Volunteer Matters
Who is a Social service Volunteer? The one who relates to an idea and offers/agrees to give time and labor to community service without coercion or payment.
Social Service Volunteer is purely based on the feeling of exchange and reciprocity. It is not selfless since the Volunteer stands to gain training, experience, and skills.
Let’s start with the original idea of volunteering, devised by government policy.
The Companies Act, 2013 made it voluntary for Private Companies to invest 2% of their profits to social causes like education, poverty, gender equality, and hunger, naming it ‘Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The April 1, 2014 amendment made its compliance, and now even COVID-19 activities performed by private companies come under CSR.
This compliance, which was once voluntary, is why the Corporate influx into the social sector.
We often find people running marathons for a social cause, with a standard corporate logo on all of their t-shirts, caps, and even wristbands. Non-governmental organizations supporting causes of enormous social impact, like saving the environment, ask for volunteers to help provide a helping hand, and spread the word.
There has been increasing curiosity about the Social Sector and overall compassion for humanity since last year. The farmers started protesting against unfair agriculture laws, the Pandemic struck, leaving the world hopeless and trepidation. You don’t need a formal degree to volunteer for a social cause.
Volunteering is a great way to divert the energy from agitation towards positively contributing to the dominant cause. For example, social work volunteer to lead a peaceful protest, provide food kits to the needy and unemployed during the Pandemic, offering to share necessary contact information for oxygen and medicine supplies, and rescue people from disaster-struck areas.
Making a Difference: The Impact of Volunteer
Volunteering is also a possible thing to do in this era because:
- Volunteering does not require much commitment on the part of the volunteers. A good samaritan from any background can volunteer for a cause close to his heart.
- Volunteers are the most energetic and passionate members of any social arrangement because they do not work under the performance pressure of being paid for work.
- Volunteering will allow a person to shift efforts between different social cause contributions simultaneously.
- There cannot be a more remarkable teacher of empathy, ground realities, teamwork experience, and time-management skills than volunteering.
- Most non-governmental organizations work on fixed funding and workforce, but their social cause might not always work according to plans. The presence of Volunteers helps these organizations perform their responsibilities better and, in the process, impart quality knowledge to the Volunteers free of cost.
Volunteering provides the necessary emotional and social intelligence wrapped in astute leadership qualities, which acts as a source of confidence to take on Social Entrepreneurship in the future. The Volunteer achieves a wealth of experience in return for a few hours of walking in the shoes of people they used to sympathize with from a distance before.
But how does the Volunteer give back to the community in return?
Social Entrepreneurship is a way to create sustainable financial support systems within small communities, like women’s self-help groups. It is a vital playground for the Volunteer to cultivate his/her skills, turn them into an income generation model based on empathy and creativity.
These Social Entrepreneurship ventures reach out to the public with their unique social cause, drawing in Volunteers and creating a cycle of social responsibility.
Kalpaka has a holistic approach to addressing the weaker sections of society through targeted research and broad reach. An open mindset and strict adherence to proper work ethic make us an ideal environment for a Volunteer to grow and learn, creating symbiotic progress in the mission to create social change.