Impact Of Volunteerism

I started volunteering nine years ago. Once a week for two years, my mother, my sister, and I volunteered at an organization that helps the unprivileged. When I entered high school I started volunteering for credits. But it wasn’t until five months ago that I realized the impact of volunteerism. It took me eight years and seven months.

Prior to this discovery, I was a part of the populace thinking that the impact of volunteerism was limited to what I was told. I was told that the impact of volunteering was that it helps you in school, that it taught you new skills, and that it helps the economy. It is not to say that these things aren’t true because they are. It has been proven that volunteering helps the economy by saving roughly 150 billion dollars in the United States and 400 billion dollars around the world annually. It has been proven that volunteering increases academic performance by sixty percent. It has been shown that ninety percent of volunteers state that they gained a new skill or ability (Wu, 2011). But those are just added bonuses - numbers collected by a national corporation studying

I saw in Egypt a city full of dirt and debris cleaning itself up; a city whose citizens became full of pride to say that they are from Alexandria and a city that is changing. Through volunteerism change is happening around the world, from the Middle East and Eastern Europe to Massachusetts. Through volunteerism a community is strengthening and pride is growing. That is the true impact of volunteerism. I started volunteering nine years ago and I was doing so without considering its impact and accepting what people told me. It wasn’t until five months ago that I got to witness and realize the impact of volunteering. It took me eight years and seven months to discover that the impact of volunteerism is more than what I was told. It took me eight years and seven months to understand that volunteerism impacts