Why Volunteers Get All The Breaks

What does it mean to claim that volunteers get all the breaks? Well, that is precisely the question I intend to address and hopefully answer in this book. How many times have you said to yourself, “If only someone would hire me, I would prove myself worthy?” How many times have you been certain that your new business venture would be a great service to the community if only people would give it a chance? The bad economic times we have endured recently have multiplied the usual hardships that accompany our attempts to gain employment or to start our own businesses. There is so much advice available from so many well-intentioned sources as to how to get us moving to acquiring employment and ultimately success for ourselves. Unfortunately far too much advice has been too long recycled, and suffering from a lack of innovation and creativity. As much as we all appreciate learning how to become better marketers of ourselves, when the well that is your finances is drying up daily, you need income, and you need it now. Volunteering no longer just for the few, the noble, the people who supposedly have extra time to spare. Volunteering may be the best, and in some cases the only way to get a job in an economy where the hiring to firing ratio is grossly disproportionate. Now more than ever employing establishments are hiring who they know first. If you have not learned anything else from our sagged economy, hopefully you learned that Plan A, B, & C are not good enough anymore. You need to have Plans A through Z ready to go into motion should the time come to put any of them to work. And if volunteering somewhere is not part of your plans, your plans are not complete. This book aims to encourage you to consider volunteering your products and services as a way to convince others to try out what you have to offer. Whether you are trying to get a job, start a career, or start a business, you are not getting anywhere if you cannot gain the interests of employers of your services or consumers of your products. My goal is to convince you that by allowing others to sample what you have to offer for free, they may be more willing to give you a chance to prove yourself. I have no doubt that a lot of struggling people in this world could really become a big hit if only they could “get in the door” to prove themselves Throughout this book, I will refer to those for whom you’d be volunteering as employers, the reason being that you could potentially volunteer for many types of establishments. You could volunteer for a club, an organization, an institution, a government, even a corporation. Another reason I will refer to them as employers is because this book aims to point you toward seeking volunteering opportunities for establishments with employees (as opposed to, say, volunteering to mow your neighbor’s grass for free). The point of this book is to help you turn volunteering into a source of opportunity in order to bring increased success into your life, not to teach you how to be a noble individual. Of course, I definitely hope volunteering does give you “that good feeling inside” of knowing you helped some folks out and asked for nothing in return. But the real purpose is to give someone a reason, and a motivation, to pay for your products or services. For this to work, you will need to learn (or rediscover) the virtue of patience. The path of the volunteer will not reap rewards overnight. I strongly encourage you to start a plan and work that plan throughout your volunteering experience. For our purposes, your experience is not complete without your exercising a healthy curiosity. While volunteering, you should be meeting people, asking questions, learning about the employer, and discovering job opportunities within.