San Diego is a great city. It has nice parks, lots of active people, it’s right on the beach and it has the downtown-urban area too. Almost anyone can find something to do here. Another one of the great things about this great city is that there are many ways to get involved in the community. The best way to do this is through volunteering. Not only is volunteering a good way to help out your local community, it also looks great on college applications and job applications. It’s a win-win situation because the work that you do benefits others and in return, you get a good feeling from somebody. If your looking into colleges, it benefits you to have volunteer work on your application.
In San Diego, you can expect many different opportunities to volunteer and help out the community. If you love the ocean, there are some really great opportunities available to you here. Big organizations such as Keep California Beautiful and I Love a Clean San Diego both sponsor campaigns against litter and massive cleanup sessions. These cleanup sessions are a great way to volunteer because you get to pick up trash from your local beach. The next time you’re enjoying the beach you helped cleanup, you’ll notice that it looks better and will feel more compelled to clean up other beaches. You can go to either of these organizations websites to find out when and where these events are scheduled. Also, remember that every piece of trash counts. The next time you see a bottle cap in the rain gutter, remember that it will eventually wash down into the ocean. So even beyond volunteering, its not a bad idea to pick up a piece of trash you see laying around.
Because of San Diego’s nice, warm, climate, there seems to be a large number of homeless people here. Helping them out (working in homeless shelters, soup kitchens, etc.) is another great volunteering opportunity. If you are interested in this, the city of San Diego has a homeless outreach team that helps out a variety of homeless people. If you are interested, their website has a lot of good information and further explains the kind of work they do.
If you’re an animal person, the San Diego Humane Society has a lot of great volunteering opportunities. These range from helping organize events to feeding and spending time with some of their animals. They also have a lot of pets in need of a good home so their website is worth looking at. The San Diego Animal Support Foundation is another nonprofit organization that relies solely on volunteer help. They help out animals in many different ways from fundraising and car donations all the way to helping out underfunded or overcrowded shelters. Like I said, they rely on volunteer work so they are a great place to volunteer at.
As you can see, San Diego has many different volunteering opportunities and is, by no means limited to the ones listed above. The website run by the City of San Diego lists many more opportunities. Hopefully everyone can volunteer a little bit and we can all make this great city, even a little bit better.