How to Create a Volunteer Opportunity if You Can’t Find One

“Help me help you.” - Jerry Maguire

Imagine this: you’ve spent weeks and months looking for the right opportunity to either learn and grow through a volunteer program, and either it’s too late or you just don’t find one that clicks and matches your skills. You get demoralized and wonder how anyone can volunteer even when it’s an unpaid position because it feels like a conventional job search. As you’re sitting in a cafe with some friends expressing your frustrations, one of them asks you if you’ve proposed any volunteering to an organization that interests you instead of looking for existing listings. 

Wait, what? Yes, you read that right: you can create your own volunteer opportunity. 

The truth of the matter is, not every organization out there is going to make a posting on the same places you are looking at, such as www.idealist.org, nor are they necessarily going to have a web presence, let alone social media. Oftentimes, organizations are so busy trying to get their operations running that they may not have time to set up even a social media presence, let alone do they feel confident enough to show anything to the world. 

For this very reason, it becomes very attractive to the organizations you may be interested in volunteering with when you take the initiative to look them up or encounter them and propose a way of offering yourself. 

There was a time at the now-closed comic store in Los Angeles, Meltdown Comics, where an event was being set up for relief for the people affected by the tsunami in Japan in 2011. As I had arrived earlier and people were trying to set things up, they were undermanned and behind schedule, so having nothing better to do, I offered to help out, carrying things with people and setting up tables. Doing this caused some people to notice me, which later led to establishing contacts for writing and voiceover work in the comic, video game, and animation industries, and had I stayed in Los Angeles instead of moving to San Diego for graduate school (where I of course met A4A’s founder Mikel Samaniego!), I would have had a very different life path.

Here’s how I created opportunities that night and how you can do that too: 

Network, connect, network, connect! 

If you don’t go out and explore, you won’t know what’s out there. This doesn’t mean do a more vigilant websearch or go to job fairs, it means that you also should go to the kind of places and events related to your interests. 

My opportunities came from going to farmer’s markets in Santa Monica, Asian history and culture events, and geek interests. By going there, I heard news from people about managers for comic publishers who were looking for a better way to get some volunteers as there were poor responses to their last posting online, and discovered organizations that had zero web presence who weren’t even new, they were just small and busy with their projects. 

By going to events, you become more active rather than relying on what’s reported by bloggers and press releases from organizations, and you demonstrate more awareness of what’s going on, and instead of taking it in as a spectator, reading the news, you are instead a participant who appears in the news, even if you’re in the background of a photo.

Don’t sell yourself, be your best self

One thing everyone can agree on is that authenticity is a very appealing and attractive characteristic. The opposite of that earns disdain and scorn, because besides being dishonest, nobody likes being lied to or played for a fool.

This is why the worst advice, “Fake it until you make it” is universally despised by people, because those without experience or those with fragile foundations believe that this is necessary to attract success. Acting like you are successful without having attained anything is the same mindset that con artists and scammers use when trying to convince people to sign up for their pyramid marketing scheme. 

It is much better then to recognize what you can and can’t do and create a steady and sincere foundation so that you aren’t asked to do linear regressions on STATA just because you learned it for a semester in graduate school by an impressed hiring manager who doesn’t know that you omitted the fact that you didn’t pass the course…

Understand who you are approaching and explain how you have what would be helpful for them

My original internship in Indonesia was designed for people to accompany staff into the field to help document their ongoing projects, being an extra set of eyes and hands for what they were already doing. What I proposed when I was interested in the position was to make use of my creative skills as a writer, blogger, photographer, and self-taught (and still ongoing!) videographer. 

I proposed to not only create material that would help them internally, but be great marketing material for them that would in turn give me video footage to let me practice my filming and editing skills. It would be as amateur as a Better Call Saul commercial, but the sincerity and love was there, and this caused my original three months to extend to five months and then extend for another year in multiple projects in more countries later on. 

I was able to recognize that the organization I interned with had a need to tell stories of children and the work they do, the impact felt by their cause, and how even a simple sponsor can have a deep impact on not just their child, but the whole village. 

If you can offer to create a website for a new organization, set up and manage their social media accounts, organize their donor list into an Excel document instead of something in Word that isn’t even alphabetical, do some basic bookkeeping because you have your own individual member’s access to QuickBooks while they’re just using their smart phone’s calculator app, then congratulations: you have more qualifications than you think you do and thus more value for the organization. 

Conclusion

These are three good starting tips for creating a volunteer opportunity when you can’t find one. It isn’t hard, but it is something that will not happen on its own without your dedication. If you can find and create an opportunity for yourself, you just may find yourself soon enough as a valuable member of the organization and no longer a volunteer.