When your loved one retires and is not sure about what to do, one of the best ways to keep them pre-occupied is to get them to volunteer for causes and activities that they care about. There are some solid reasons why this makes so much sense. Typically, your loved one will probably have the time now to engage in the things that they have always loved to do. The benefit of keeping your loved one engaged is that volunteering helps them develop new social networks, which is awesome for their mental health. Volunteering also helps to keep their minds active, preventing mental problems such as stress and boredom. Here are some great volunteering opportunities for your loved one.
Environmental Conservation
At this moment, there is a lot of talk and action around environmental conservation and ensuring that we limit pollution. If this is an area that your loved one is interested in, there are numerous opportunities that will keep him or her busy. At the local level, your family member can work as a volunteer to create awareness, take action or lobby policymakers for better environmental laws. All these are areas within the environmental conservation space where your family member can effectively bring change and make the world better.
Veteran Affairs
Veterans are among some of the people that this country should always be proud of. Unfortunately, the system that is set up to care for veterans has some loopholes, and many former soldiers fall through and live lives of suffering. This is especially true for injured soldiers and those struggling with mental illnesses. Your family member can volunteer to help veterans in some of these areas. This can be in many different forms, including mentorship or assisting them to access medical care and other remedial measures that they need.
Helping Children
Another important area that your loved one could volunteer in is to help needy children. All across the United States and the world, children are struggling due to a variety of factors. Poverty, especially in the inner cities, affects American children’s ability to learn, get access to proper food and enjoy their childhood as they are supposed to. There are many organizations working in this space to help create remedies for these problems. Some of these organizations are involved in protecting children from physical and mental harm, and if this is something your family member is particularly concerned about, then helping children makes for a perfect cause. There is even more to do for children outside the United States. In many countries, children suffer from wars, famine, epidemics and much more. Working for causes that help to ease such suffering can be a great and rewarding cause for your loved one to be engaged in.
Promoting the Arts
It is often easy to look down on the arts as being secondary to economic activities such as industrial works and so on. Lobbying policymakers to give more funding to the arts can go a long way in helping the next generation enjoy classic works of art such as books and paintings.
