Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

I offer an hour of mentoring time to anyone who has a school project, is thinking about changing the focus of their computer science career, or wants to talk about the tech they are using in their projects. I have a web page on my site with directions for getting in touch with me, and what information to provide up front. Many more people have taken me up on the offer than I expected when I started doing this a few years ago.

In my career, several people really helped me with advice, sometimes just listening, etc. and I want to do the same thing for other people.

I have benefitted from being a volunteer for a long time, the great degree of transferrable skills:

ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTITUDE DEVELOPMENT: Volunteering is great in that the barrier is incredibly low to make things happen. Want to see something happen? Go do it, or better yet, learn to do it with others. You generally don't need permission to start your own thing and make a difference if you don't see something happening.

LEARN TO ALWAYS ADD VALUE, FIRST: Volunteering taught me to add value first, unconditionally. Volunteering is a habit that can be practiced to the point of it being second nature, and that's when it gets really special.

ORGANIC NETWORK DEPTH: Through adding value always, a side effect, volunteering gradually grew my network through similarly practicing people who over time think of you as you think of them. I genuinely have an interest in people and curious enough that I can be sincere about giving a shit about others.

Most people think of networking as primarily a professional thing. Networking helps you volunteer much better too, when you have a track record of getting things done and successes under your belt with a group of people - if need arises, a group of you can move into the realm of community organizing and not just volunteering.

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING: When you learn to work with people that can't always work with others - this is a highly transferrable skill. Beyond this, creating approachable opportunities for others to volunteer who can only see their time as x hours a month is very powerful, if you find this something you want to do. Direct and transferrable parallels to startup growth.

LOOKING BACK (and forward).. you get a track record. You know you can learn anything, build and direct towards things.

An odd thing to look back and see that you start to forget the things you have work on because you get the real gift of volunteering - an ability to be a doer and use it in other areas of your life.

My volunteer experience is as odd as it is varied, and I get to be able to use a lot of it in my professional life, from the small things of helping where needed at a table, whether it's event planning it's starting a tiny conference and growing it to 300 people for many years, or learning the logistics of organizing a parade for over 20,000 people for a decade, and recently organizing tens of thousands of meals for volunteers during a disaster fire, I have picked up valuable skills such as being a driving force in raising funds (totalling in the hundreds of thousands) for universities, food banks, and other disasters.

It doesn't matter if the volunteering role is big, or small. Small things that are meant to click, do, and you get to serve something that hopefully will out live you for 5-10-20 years.

I'm studying what's different about the positive volunteer movements that seem to last a very long time (and outgrow the founder and continue on for 50-100 years.)

So far, I sense it's about the ability for future volunteers to have the experience of depth and quality of connections, not quantity. You have nothing to lose but your time volunteering, and it's often a better way to spend it than to do nothing at all with it, or expose yourself to a little wider world.

Also an ASL (in Scotland) and can confirm that it is incredibly rewarding helping to shape young people's approach to leadership and teamwork.

It's very hard and can consume A LOT of time (to a detrimental effect on my career no doubt) but I love the sense of community and fun that the young people get from it.

Not OP but, in the UK ASL is the lower position. This https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A17719527 is a good summary of all the structures.

Some groups have "adult helpers" but generally that's avoided as it suggests the parent will only be there fleetingly in which case spending the training resources (mainly time) is not efficient.

I was a volunteer firefighter from about 1992-2002 or so. During that time I attained my NC Fire and Rescue Commission certification as Fire Instructor II with qualifications to teach Firefighter I&II certification classes, LP Gas Firefighting and Incident Command. I held ranks from probie to Assistant Chief and was acting Fire Chief for a few months at one point.

So, how did I grow from all that? Well, I got a lot more comfortable operating in front of crowds, teaching and delivering content, as a result of teaching FF classes.

I also became generally more stoic and mentally "tough" if you want to call it that, since on the fireground you don't really have the luxury of freaking out and being super reactive to things. You learn to become very pragmatic and adopt a mindset of "this is the situation as it is, now let's figure out what to do about it".

And on a related note, it taught me the importance of what firefighters call "size up" which basically just means doing a quick, but reasonably thorough, assessment of a situation at the earliest possible moment, in order to avoid surprises. Example: on a house fire, if a crew go in on an attack line to do interior attack, and nobody does a 360° sizeup, you may miss the 500 gallon propane tank next to the back wall, which is being impinged on by fire. Result: BLEVE and possibly injured or killed firefighters.

And while in the business world you're not usually dealing with anything where people's lives are on the line, sizeup and those kinds of things are still important.

Anyway, I did that for about a decade, but then I moved and got into the meat of my "proper" career and don't really have time for firefighting anymore. I haven't been doing a lot of volunteering lately, but the one thing I'd like to find time to get involved with is the Literacy Council. My mom was a volunteer tutor when I was a kid and I kinda always wanted to do that.