Good morning everyone,

I am looking to do charity work for one year straight. Starting in February of 2024 my job is giving me a years salary to go do charity work of any sort.

So my question is, what kind of charity needs help around central Pennsylvania, USA?

I know there are soup kitchens and some popular ones like Habitat for Humanity, but how do I help the ones that might not have as many people helping them?

I apologize if this isn’t the correct place to post this, I’m still very new to Lemmy.

Thank you

  • cynar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    If you want something to commit a year of your life to, you want to match it to your own personality. It should be enjoyable (or at least satisfying) to you. It would help to know more about you. What are your interests and hobbies? Do you have any skills/skillsets that could be valuable to a charity?

    Also think in terms of force multipliers. If you’ve experience with multi million dollar contracts, you could help a lot with a big charity, but would be wasted on a small one. Conversely, if your experience is smaller in scale, your help will have FAR more of an impact in a small, local charity. In a large charity, you would just be a cog in a different machine.

    E.g. If you have some admin skills (and enjoyed it) you could be a life saver to small, local charity, that can’t afford a full time admin person. If you have electrical wiring experience, you could put that to use.

    Also pay attention to optics for your job. In a perfect world, you want something that looks good for them to be supporting, and builds skills you can bring back into your workplace. You don’t want to be seen as swanning off for a year having fun, with little to nothing to show for it.

    • Zyrinth@sh.itjust.worksOP
      4·
      1 year ago

      That’s fair. I’ve done some small charity work, like food bank, packaging clothing/food, help local places via habitat for humanity. I really enjoyed those but that was more because it was with people I knew. I don’t mind meeting people, so I’m sure the experience will be fine either way.

      I don’t have any amazing skills. I’m just a gamer and a fantasy nerd. I’ve worked at an ace hardware for 10 years so I have some home improvement knowledge but I never owned my own house so I only have knowledge of how to do things, not hands on experience.

      Honestly, having both kinds of charities would be ideal. Being able to help globally and Sri have time for local stuff would be ideal, I just don’t know enough about all this and when I reach out to these big places for help, they just want me to join them instead of trying to help me find something suitable.

      I’m in an ad min in my current job, handling around 10 mil+ revenue, I’m not sure if that counts towards large scale contracts. But since I’ve got the experience, I’ll definitely reach out and see what comes of it.

      True, I didn’t think of that. However, my boss is extremely generous. Our whole team is getting a year off to do charity work for a whole year. So our salaries are paid for the year and during this time, the only thing he’s asking is to help others. Honestly it’s a bit overwhelming trying to figure out what I can do. I wasn’t too worried about not having anything to show for it but I guess I should?

      I really appreciate this break down. I’ll have to talk to my team and bring this up during our next weekly meeting. Hopefully the others will get some ideas out of this.