What is volunteering?

Volunteering is giving of yourself to help others. Volunteering is serving your community. It is giving of your time and talents to make our community stronger or to enrich the lives of individuals within the community. Volunteering is not about doing a task that will benefit you directly. All communities have a great need for volunteers. 

It is not considered volunteering to do for free what you might normally get paid to do. For example, working for a for-profit business is different from working for the March of Dimes, even though you might be doing similar tasks. The March of Dimes could not function without someone volunteering their time; the for-profit organization can hire someone. In emergency situations, volunteering might benefit for-profit businesses, for example, sandbagging in the event of a flash flood.

Volunteering is different from what normally might be expected from a family member. Mowing grandma’s yard is a wonderful, thoughtful task to do but it is doing something as a family member and not as a service to the community.

There will always be some “gray areas” that one person sees as volunteerism and another does not. To help WDCVC move towards consistency in accepting volunteer hours, we ask that you fill out an approval form in advance of the activity if it might fit into that gray area.