Skip to footer

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.

3. Volunteer at a food pantry

Erik Hill/The Anchorage Daily News/AP
Kelsey Ingram, 6, helps out at one of the Thanksgiving Blessing Project food distribution locations on, Nov. 25, at Alaska Native Cultural Charter School in Anchorage, Alaska.

  • By Noelle Swan Staff writer

Since the economic downturn in 2008, the number of families turning to food pantries to fill their cupboards has risen. In 2012, 6 million households sought food from a pantry at least once during the year, according to the United States Census, up from 4 million households in 2002. As need has grown, so has the demand for volunteer staff.

There are many ways to contribute to a food pantry. Families can either donate food or volunteer to work behind the scenes. Food pantries frequently enlist volunteers to pick up food from regional food banks, sort through donations, stock shelves, and put together sacks of food for families. The variety of chores for volunteers can make food pantries an ideal place for each member of the family – including small children – to find a way that they can contribute. 

Families looking for a local pantry to support can check with to area churches, community organizations, and food banks. Many are listed on the searchable website Foodpantries.org.

3 of 9
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.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.