Volunteering your skills and expertise for a good cause can be a rewarding and fulfilling experience that offers several benefits. From speaking with the skilled volunteers of our Community Connections Program, we learnt that as they helped our community partners build capacity and address challenges, skilled volunteers also benefited from the knowledge they gained about protracted social issues, the professional network they were able to expand, and the sense of purpose they were able to find from being a part of something larger than themselves.
Here are some of the benefits you can gain from being a skilled volunteer:
- Build the future you want to see: Skilled volunteering is an excellent way to contribute to your community by using your unique skills and expertise. By volunteering, you can have a positive impact on the lives of others and contribute to building a more sustainable and equitable society.
- Boost your career: Increasingly, skills-based volunteering engagements are seen by professionals and employers as the new executive training ground. By working with social impact organizations, you will be exposed to the community in which your company operates and get a better understanding of the challenges it faces. Compared to costly executive education programs that often have standardized (or outdated) curricula, skills-based volunteering offers you a dynamic environment to develop leadership skills and gain diverse experiences, which are essential to your career advancement. The insights you gain can enrich your perspectives as a global citizen and they can be used to inform your company’s ESG or philanthropic strategies. Additionally, you will learn new skills and tools while practising your leadership, communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills as you work in an entirely different context than your workplace. In fact, senior executives tend to consider external engagements when assessing a candidate for succession planning.
- Broaden your network: Volunteering can help you expand your professional network and create valuable connections with others in or beyond your field. For example, you may be connected with professionals from your industry or beyond from working with other skilled volunteers for a social impact organization, or working with the staff and beneficiaries of a social impact organization. These connections can lead to new job opportunities, collaborations, or friendships.
- Sense of purpose: Taking part in meaningful projects and seeing the tangible results of your efforts can give you a sense of accomplishment. Moreover, working with social impact organizations advancing the causes you care about not only gives you an avenue to contribute to building the future you want to see, but also enables you to find your purpose in the workplace or your personal life.
- Personal growth: Volunteering can help you grow personally and professionally. It can provide opportunities to develop new skills, gain new experiences, and build your resume. It can also help you to discover new passions and interests.
- Improve your mental and physical health: Studies have shown that volunteering can lead to reduced stress, improved mental health, and increased overall life satisfaction. Skills-based volunteering is an effective way to lead a more meaningful life, which comes with bountiful health benefits such as less loneliness, less chronic pain, better sleep quality, and healthier lifestyles.
- AI-proof your future: Collaborating with and taking the perspectives of the people from fields you aren’t normally exposed to can broaden your scope of empathy and understand the diversity of individuals in society. From passion, empathy, dedication to creativity, skills-based volunteering can help unleash your human qualities.
Community Connections: Connecting You with Community Partners Addressing Social Causes You Care About
At Foundation for Shared Impact (FSI), we have connected more than 280 corporate professionals with 120-plus community partners through our Community Connections Program since 2020. Skilled volunteers said they have benefited immensely from gaining a better understanding of the Hong Kong social impact space, obtaining the education, experience, and opportunity that comes from working with incredible organizations, being part of something bigger and socially impactful, and building a community around social impact work in their workplaces.
Our Community Connections team would schedule consultations with you to help you identify your areas of passion, the skills and expertise you want to volunteer, and your desired level of time commitment. We would connect you with our community partners who are committed to addressing the social issues that you are passionate about. We would guide you through the goal-setting and roadmapping processes to ensure that you have a clear plan for your social impact and leadership journey.
Read the case stories below to learn why time-strapped professionals would take time out of their hectic schedules to volunteer for our community partners!
- Nick Shao-Wilson, Marketing Director at Tatler Asia, and currently Marketing Adivsor for Soap Cycling to help Asia’s first and largest youth-led soap recycling charity reach a broader audience and better communicate its impact. Read more here.
- Sandy Lin, a partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, and legal advisor for Wedu, a Singapore-based organization committed to empowering women changemakers around the world, to help the organization draft contracts for its core programs. Read more here.
- Carl Fernando, a risk management professional at Macquarie, who helped PathFinders build out a risk management framework so that the organization can better serve its beneficiaries of migrant mothers and their children in Hong Kong. Read more here.
- Monica Cai, Controller, Cost Management & Analytics, Nomura, and Michael Fung, Senior Accountant, PwC Hong Kong, who helped Third Sector Connect, a social enterprise that helps social impact organizations build capacity, to enhance its work processes. Read more here.
If you are interested in joining Community Connections as an individual/independent skilled volunteer, fill out this form! If you are a corporate looking to offer your employees impactful skills-based volunteering opportunities like those documented in our case stories, get in touch with us at communityconnections@shared-impact.com.
