As the calendar creeps toward February, you might already have broken (or even forgotten) your New Year’s Resolutions. It’s easy to push things aside when the focus is you—so why not focus on someone else for a while? If you’re looking to do volunteer work in Dallas, the city has many worthy charities and organizations that can use your donations and your time. In addition to all the good karma you’ll be building up by helping others, it’s also a great way to network and meet new people.
How do you decide where you should volunteer in Dallas? Think about your passions. Do you love working with children, or do you have a soft-spot for our furry, four-legged friends? Do you want to keep children from going to bed hungry, or help someone with disabilities learn basic life skills? Dallas has a big heart, and you will be able to find a charity to match almost any interest or passion you can think of.
The Family Place
If you’re interested in helping victims of domestic violence, try volunteering at The Family Place. The Family Place is the non-profit provider of domestic violence services in Dallas, and its staff and volunteers help protect thousands of families each year. Women and children in need can seek emergency shelter, counseling, and transitional housing, and the center also provides legal services, a battery intervention and prevention program, medical care, psychological care, and after-school programs.
According to their website’s statistics, in 2009 there were 5,750 homeless people in Dallas, with women and children making up more than half of that number—and 27% said the reason for their homelessness was domestic violence. More women are injured through domestic violence than through mugging, rape, and car crashes combined.
Those statistics are sobering—but you can make a difference in these women and children’s lives in a range of ways. If you have weekday evenings or Saturday mornings free, you can volunteer in the Children’s Program and Child Development Center, playing with children and coordinating snacks and events. You can also assist with donations, respond to hotline calls, be a clerk in their resale store, and work on special projects such as the Holiday Angel Tree—they have shifts for these positions available at all times of day and on the weekends, so you can fit your volunteer work around their schedule and yours.
To be a volunteer at The Family Place, you’ll have to fill out a form and attend a volunteer orientation. Visit www.thefamilyplace.org to find a volunteer position that’s right for you, or call 214-559-2170 for more details.
Best Buddies International
Sometimes there’s nothing more important you can give than your friendship—and joining the Dallas chapter of Best Buddies lets you do just that. Best Buddies started in 1989 and is a nonprofit that helps people with intellectual and development disabilities (IDD) form friendships, master basic life skills, get jobs, and become confident leaders.
You can make a difference through seven different programs, including Best Buddies Citizens (which will match you with a person with IDD so that you can share a one-on-one friendship), Best Buddies Jobs (helping people with IDD to get and maintain jobs), or Best Buddies Middle School, High School, or College (this is for student volunteers—you’ll be matched with a student with IDD who’s around your age). If you don’t have much extra time but still want to be involved, consider the e-Buddies® program—you’ll get an email pen pal and you’ll exchange emails at least once a week for a year.
According to the organization’s website, Best Buddies has made an impact in the lives of nearly 700,000 people all over the world—why not make it 700,001? Visit www.bestbuddies.org or call the Dallas number at 214-979-1113 for more information.
Operation Kindness
Are you an animal lover? Consider volunteering at Operation Kindness, a Dallas no-kill animal shelter that has been operating since 1976. The organization offers pets for adoption and fostering, works to educate the community about the importance of spaying/neutering pets and being a responsible pet owner, and even makes nursing home visits with the animals in their care (and what’s better than giving back to something that pays it forward?).
Operation Kindness takes volunteers every day of the week but Friday, and you can take on an array of roles: dog walking, dog training, transporting animals, publicity, and more. If you have room in your home for another furry friend on a short-term basis, you may even want to be an Operation Kindness “foster parent,” providing love to an abandoned dog and cat until it’s ready to find a forever owner.
To volunteer, you must fill out an application and attend an orientation and a training session. To get started volunteering at Operation Kindness, visit www.operationkindness.org or call 972-418- 7297 ext. 248. Dog is man’s best friend—and you can be theirs back!
North Texas Food Bank
Do you take the food on your table for granted? Not everyone has that luxury, and the North Texas Food Bank is fighting hunger across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The organization served over 45 million meals last year and has fourteen feeding and education programs, including Kids Café (which provides free hot meals to children), the Mobile Food Pantry (which provides emergency food boxes containing enough food to feed two people for four days), and Nutrition Education/Cooking Matters (a program that teaches local families how to make healthy, economical meals).
The North Texas Food Bank seeks to provide more than meals to the hungry, however—it also provides skills to the poor so that they can leverage those skills into jobs and fight future hunger. At The Community Kitchen, disadvantaged individuals can gain culinary training while preparing meals for hungry families, while at Texas Second Chance, selected prison inmates can volunteer and gain skills in warehousing and food services.
If you’re interested in volunteering with the North Texas Food Bank, you can sort food in the warehouse, assist with special events, teach nutrition classes, or help with canned food drives. Or just donate a dollar—it feeds four people. Visit www.ntfb.org to learn about other options and get involved.
Giving back to the Dallas community by taking volunteer opportunities benefits the organization and you. You’ll be making a worthy contribution that you can take pride in and touching countless lives. It’s not too late to make a new New Year’s Resolution—so make one that betters your own life as well as someone else’s.
