Happy National Volunteer Week to everyone reading from the US. I wish I could brag that I planned it this way, but I couldn’t have picked a more exciting time to visit home. I soaked everything in a few weeks ago when many of the country’s inspirational and nerdy do-gooders descended on Atlanta for the giant Nonprofit Technology Conference known as NTEN. But after over feeding my brain, I was more than ready to do something hands on when I found an organization gathering volunteers this past Saturday. I didn’t realize until I arrived that the day’s activities would be a combined effort of over 1200 people from all over Atlanta. The organizing group, Do.Justice, coordinated with several non-profits and city officials to accomplish in a few hours on a Saturday morning, what would have taken a few salaried employees 2-3 years to do. Plastered on their homepage of their website you can find the following quote:

“Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

They back up that motto by allowing people to choose an organization that matches their skills, dividing them into teams and sending them all over the city to accomplish a multitude of tasks such as landscaping, clean up, painting, and spending time with youth and kids. As you can probably guess, I chose to do the latter after finding an organization called Essential2Life that had similar objectives as our Sanuk My Saturday project. However, in addition to providing a safe environment where kids could be kids, they boasted a successful mentoring program for teens at risk of dropping out where participants not only stayed in school, but went on to pursue secondary education.

I reveled in being able to not only ponder these possibilities, but to see an organization who had put them to work ten or fifteen years earlier. So when I wasn’t playing, I was daydreaming about implementing some of the things I had seen and learned lately in the communities we’re serving in Bangkok. I still have about two weeks left to take advantage of some of the exciting happenings here and spend time with family. As the time winds down, lets hope airlines aren’t yet penalizing people for traveling with too many ideas.

If you missed my interview last Sunday on Global Humanitarian Discussions with Megan Schiebe, you can listen here. What’s happening in your community this week? Are you volunteering or joining a local celebration of Earth Day?

~Dwight