Volunteering fun

I have been helping my high school class find missing classmates in preparation for our 50^th reunion next year (see www.catonsville1964.com) and I discovered that one of the classmates uses the name “volunteeringfun” in her e-mail address.  What a wonderfully appropriate description of what I have been experiencing this year.

It’s been said many times that you “get more than you receive” when you volunteer and that certainly was the case when my Cockeysville church (Epworth UMC) sent 24 volunteers to the annual Goodwill Thanksgiving dinner to help serve.  John McGucken was again the perfect “Santa Claus” and he was helped several of our youth who were “elves”.  In part, it was fun because it was multi-generational.  The energy and vitality of the youth brings a little livelier step for us older folks.

I’ve been doing a lot of other things for my church this year including

construction of a new office, going on a mission trip, and even painting several of the exterior doors to the church to give them a consistent dark green color.  I also helped paint the storage shed and that’s when I got to learn about the new HVLP latex paint sprayers.  Very ingenious.  I’m also the “sign guy” who changes the message in front of the church and now I have been tapped to be the chair of the Staff-Parish Relations Committee.  It’s a lot of work, but its fun.

The Hereford Community Association needed my help this year with representing them at the Baltimore County Police Community Association meetings.  This was a particularly good fit for me because of the many years that I served on the Washington, D.C. Police/Media Relations Council.  It was a place where police and media officials could discuss their problems without being in the heat of a crisis and an opportunity to build trust.  In the 60s and 70s, trust was a big issue separating those groups.  I found that trust can still be an issue today when people don’t know how they feel about devices that automatically scan their license plates at shopping centers and create a record of where they have been.

The Baltimore Public Relations Council is another place where I volunteer (I’m their treasurer) and except for a snafu concerning our tax –exempt status, it also has been a lot of fun.  It’s an opportunity for me to keep my hand in media relations, hang out with a lot of people that I truly respect, and even get a free meal once in a while.

Volunteering fun.