March 2018
Kieran Gorsky

Volunteerism has existed for centuries. The act of volunteering is defined as investing one’s time or talents for charitable, educational or beneficial purposes. 
 

Volunteering is the idea that, no matter how great its impact,  any beneficial act is important, because it creates good in the world.
 

Throughout this year, both at my religious school and in my life in general, I have learned a lot about this idea. For example, I helped my religious school make phones calls on behalf of the Jewish National Fund. The job was simple: Make phone calls to people who had donated to the organization in the past to help raise money to plant trees in Israel. At the beginning of the session, I had a long list of potential donors and a script.  I made the calls, but in the end, only one person answered the phone. 
 

Earlier in the year I helped serve food at Out of the Cold (OOTC), a wonderful organization that serves food to Hamilton’s less fortunate. My volunteer experiences there have been among the best of my life. There is an indefinable feeling of fulfillment that comes from such simple tasks like serving food. It may sound like a cliché, but there really are experiences in life that are far more rewarding than any amount of money you could receive. The feeling that you are helping people, not for your own benefit, but for a greater cause is what makes volunteering so appealing. 
 

What can we learn from these two examples? Volunteering may not always be rewarding. You have to be persistent,  a lot of people will dismiss you, and often, you’re not going to get anything tangible in return. Not every second will be filled with feelings of contentedness and joy. However, in my short experience on earth, the feeling of good will always wins out in the end. If you don’t think about the grand scale of things, but focus on the idea of assisting someone else, you always get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. And so, I feel that volunteerism is a wonderful thing. In the process of helping other people, you yourself become fulfilled. By volunteering, you help yourself as much as you help everyone else.