The main point of working on the social media campaign is to get as many people involved as we can. I hope to get attention from other young volunteers by these social networks. Blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube are the most popular social networks nowadays, so By sharing the interesting and inspiring stories, I hope to get into young generation's heart. GNML online lab is really helpful to make us inspire others by our posts and experiences.

Unsung Hero: Volunteer helps homeless fill basic needs

For the past 18 months, Senta Pfeiffer has volunteered to help the Heartland House’s 46 families, dropping off everything from toys to toilet paper.

Pfeiffer received the Unsung Hero Friend of the Homeless Award for 2013 from the Sioux Empire Homeless Coalition, she praised the people who confront the issue full time.

“I don’t feel like I’m worthy of this,” she told the coalition members assembled for their monthly meeting, thanking those who “do it for a living.”

Read more here

The Volunteer: Longtime volunteer lives to help others

Alicia Armstrong lives and breathes volunteerism. It’s her job. It’s her passion.

She exudes her passion for volunteering and her volunteers with boundless enthusiasm and pep.

Mrs. Armstrong, 61, is reluctant to talk about her position as Smith County Sheriff’s Office Volunteer Coordinator and her effectiveness as a volunteer wrangler and advocate. But she’s not reluctant to share her love for giving time, her goal to help others give their time in a mutually beneficial way and her belief that volunteerism is more of a gift for those who do the giving.

“For me (volunteering) is part of the Golden Rule … ‘do unto others,’” she said. “It makes you feel good to help others.”

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Volunteer of the Year: Norton Woman has Helped People for Decades

Caruso’s award was for outstanding and dedicated volunteer service to Mountain View Regional Medical Center in Norton, where she serves as vice president of the hospital’s volunteer auxiliary and manager of the gift shop. But anyone who knows Barbara — and that includes practically everyone in Norton and Wise County — knows of her outstanding and dedicated volunteer service in many other aspects of community spirited activism spanning many decades.Now 75, Barbara Caruso has quite simply volunteered her services in one fashion or another since she was a young girl growing up in the Carfax area of Wise County, an unincorporated community located between Coeburn and St. Paul.

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Volunteers Slice Up Fun, Desserts at Chocolate Extravaganza

           Before desserts are served to the public each year at the Chocolate Extravaganza, one group of volunteers gets the first peek at these chocolate creations.The volunteers spend time cutting slices of cakes, tortes and other treats for about two hours before the event. They also place name tags of the items with the desserts, and then they have the task of cleaning up all the dishes.Despite the hard work, they encourage others to volunteer with the event in the future.

See the article here!

CSR Food for Thought

        The CSR Food for Thought series is a weekly roundup of relevant news from around the Web, presented to you in one bite-sized blog post. They provided this information for us.This is not related to volunteering, but I found it on one of the blogs about volunteering and wanted to share. CVS Pharmacy did a brave thing to stop selling cigarettes in their drug stores. The decision according to Forbes will result in $2 billion fewer sales per year, but still it is a good thing to do for making our living community healthier and happier.See the article here!

Hey guys!

I am Ani and this is my blog, created for writing about issues in my homecountry community. There are many social, political or economic issues in my country, that are important not only for me, but for community in general. But I will stress only one of them in this essay, that I think is most important for me and I can have some influence on that. One of the best things that I like in USA is community service (volunteering). People agree to help others for free, even if they don’t know them. That is very generous and useful for not only your personality, for country and society as well. The definition of volunteering is to promote good and improve life of society, including your own.

In my country, Georgia, community service is not very common. People don’t seem to care about others and their most common excuse is time. But it’s wrong. What can be more pleasant than helping others and hearing “thank you” coming out from the hearts of the people that you barely know, but you’re helping them as you would help yourself?

One of my favorite quotes by Audrey Hepburn says:” As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.” I totally agree with that. I’m growing old, I see other countries developing and as a patriotic citizen I start to think: What can I do for my country? How can I improve the level of living? How can I help? And this is what comes to my mind. What if it’s not just me who wants to help? What if there are plenty of people thinking the same way, but don’t know how to react? They need a leader or someone who can show them the way to follow, the example to follow. Maybe I can be that leader. I would like to make a club at school first, then maybe in community, to encourage everyone and especially young generation to help other people and don’t expect any gain, except respect and self-worth.

In Georgia, there are not many activities for volunteering, as it is in USA. Here you can go anywhere to find little tables saying “need volunteers” and you see a lot of people signing up. But in Georgia you can hardly see people volunteering to help others without any financial gain. Of course I wish to change that in my country, but only thing to think about is how. I will start with a club in my school and ask my friend to join it. Then I’ll try to make friends of my friends join the club, and then their friends and I hope our club will get many students. I would arrange the meetings for this club, where I would inform all the members about this activity, sharing my personal experience and other people’s experiences from the workshop. I would organize some events for volunteering. I’ve been in US for nearly two months now and in spite of my homework assignments and activities with my host family for exploring US, I have already done 45 hours of community service. Doing good things for free makes one’s self-respect rise. But you also realize that during these activities you’re actually having a lot of fun and making new friends. That’s why I think the club I’m going to make will be successful. 

This is my big goal to be able to do all the things that I described above. But I will need some help arranging everything and understanding how it works in US, to be able to make it work in Georgia too. I will try my best to be part of these workshop, because it can help me a lot to achieve my goal.

What goes around, comes around.