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Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

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Re: Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

#61

Post by eevilspock »

mattparlane wrote: post #4

I'm from New Zealand and I'm currently living in Thailand volunteering for an anti human trafficking organisation, rescuing children from the sex trade. I was thrown in the deep end and had to quickly become a Salesforce administrator and developer, I'm now running two Salesforce orgs, as well as all the other stuff we have going on. I've found it an amazing exercise -- I've grown in patience, understanding of other…

Working to stop human trafficking, especially of children, is on top of my list of things I'd want to work on. Can you provide more information about this org, and how effective they are? What kind of roles are available. I'm natural talents are technology and working with children (I've worked in preschools).

Re: Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

#62

Post by g0collins »

fruzz wrote: post #34

I am currently on a table with local health care organizations to improve trans-related health services in the area. I also give workshops to trans/non-binary/gender-diverse individuals as well as cisgender individuals that work with them (HR, psychotherapists.) Right now this amounts to about an evening's worth of work every week for the last 5 months. Last spring I mentored young women (high school age) who were in…

You don't have your email set so created an anonymous account just to say thanks for doing what you are doing, it really really matters and means a lot

Re: Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

#63

Post by CalRobert »

awjr wrote: post #25

I’d accidentally ridden into a Critical Mass Cycle protest ride in London around 2010. Ended up setting one up in Bath, that ran for a bit and started attending the local cycle campaigning group. A respect ride held in honour of a young man that was killed in a hit and run however became something bigger than a Friday night protest ride, and I was the main speaker at a large ride held in his honour. It was rather hum…

That's fantastic! I recently joined the Dublin Cycling Campaign and we want to do things like this - as you mention, the map at https://cyclebath.org.uk/map/ is an inspiration.

Re: Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

#64

Post by christineknox »

beadoer wrote: post #26

As an American from an immigrant family, I owe so much to the volunteer mentors, teachers, coaches, and community activists that volunteered in programs I was in growing up in New York City. It eventually led me to go to college, then on to work as a NASA engineer and for many startup companies afterward. I've personally volunteered in NYC, LA, Spain, Brazil, mostly in the homeless, substance abuse, and prostitution/…

This is great! Can organizations use your site?

Re: Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

#65

Post by edw519 »

I started a prayer group for people dissatisfied with mainstream religion and hosted it in my conference room on weekends. The response was overwhelming.

Although it was a group effort, I ended up doing every job at one point or another: scheduling activities, speaking and writing, leading services, teaching classes, preparing meals, doing the website and communications, printing all the materials, arranging the furniture, even playing the piano.

It was just like running a business with all its ups and downs, with profits paid to the heart, not the wallet. There were no "metrics" to this endeavor so I really don't know how others' lives were affected, but I imagine and hope that they're still paying if forward.

Biggest surprise: how much I grew by giving. My people skills got so much better that they (almost) caught up to my tech skills. Now I feel like I can handle just about business situation.

My favorite night ever was when my mother came and said, "I'm so proud of you."

Best "job" I ever had.

Re: Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

#66

Post by swalberg »

kalleth wrote: post #30

I volunteer, but not for anything related to software development. I'm an ASL (Assistant Scout Leader) for a scout troop in London. I enjoyed my time in the scouts as a kid, and i figured if i was only able to enjoy it as others gave up their time, perhaps it's time I pay it forward. Turns out, it's been incredibly rewarding. In our career we tend to spend loads of time inside, and this has got me out doing active th…

I started off in Canada as a Cub leader. I was very hesitant because I didn't see myself as "good" with kids that were not my own. Took me about a year but I grew into it, eventually being the Akela of the pack. Since then I moved to the troop level, and after moving to the US, I'm an ASM with a BSA troop.

It's very rewarding to help young people discover the outdoors and help them on their path to being young, responsible, adults.

Re: Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

#67

Post by awjr »

gideonparanoid wrote: post #60
awjr wrote: post #25

I’d accidentally ridden into a Critical Mass Cycle protest ride in London around 2010. Ended up setting one up in Bath, that ran for a bit and started attending the local cycle campaigning group. A respect ride held in honour of a young man that was killed in a hit and run however became something bigger than a Friday night protest ride, and I was the main speaker at a large ride held in his honour. It was rather hum…

That's great! I find cycling & its place in society to be a really interesting subject, & one which I take part in (cycling is my main mode of transport), encourage & engage (member of Leeds cycling campaign) with in a fair few ways. As a software dev, I'm particularly interested in the ways in which you found to apply your techical skills to the subject. What other ways do you you see of using those to further impro…

It started by looking at http://datashine.org.uk and the sister commute site http://commute.datashine.org.uk/

From which I derived this spreadsheet (ongoing) : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zSLXKO0zRBHeHcunKv5B...

I then downloaded WU03EW MSOA data into this fusion table: https://fusiontables.google.com/DataSource?docid=1sNyIr6EGEE...

From which I've extracted values I am interested in.

However I find it painful to work with.

I now have a city to msoa lookup as well as the population centroids from the datashine commute site (thanks to them for providing them to me)

I am now looking at commuters within a city, those coming from the outside, as well as those travelling across the city.

In particular I'm seeing modal split analysis which indicates 100%+ levels of cycling than being used by the council for transport policy. This may be down to the fact Bath and North East Somerset is a mixed urban/rural county.

I need to find MSOA population densities per km2 (have a source please link!) to be able to determine if there is a correlation between low density and car use. (I suspect it is true given our poor public transport.)

I've now downloaded all the data into a Postgres db to allow me to play with it better and want to paint a national picture.

Once I have this done at MSOA level I want to look at doing this at LSOA level as the accuracy is that much better.

Re: Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

#68

Post by awjr »

CalRobert wrote: post #63
awjr wrote: post #25

I’d accidentally ridden into a Critical Mass Cycle protest ride in London around 2010. Ended up setting one up in Bath, that ran for a bit and started attending the local cycle campaigning group. A respect ride held in honour of a young man that was killed in a hit and run however became something bigger than a Friday night protest ride, and I was the main speaker at a large ride held in his honour. It was rather hum…

That's fantastic! I recently joined the Dublin Cycling Campaign and we want to do things like this - as you mention, the map at https://cyclebath.org.uk/map/ is an inspiration.

The tutorial is really useful http://www.cyclinguk.org/guide/make-tube-map-cycle-network but it does use the colour scheme before I switched to something that matches IAN 195 http://www.standardsforhighways.co.uk/ha/standards/ians/pdfs...

You won't believe the amount of time it took to get the wording right on the legend :D Spent hours with Jonathan from GMCC and Cycle Nation coming to the right wording. Colours are also colourblind safe.

Re: Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

#69

Post by JediWing »

cafard wrote: post #32

Grow, I can't say. I did find it instructive helping out as a baseball coach when my son was young. There I learned (I thought) why the American school system puts the cutoff for a passing grade somewhere around 60: if you give a child something he can do 2/3 of the time, he may remain engaged in the task; 1/3 of the time, he will be bored and frustrated. I guess it did teach me something about teaching. These days I…

> if you give a child something he can do 2/3 of the time, he may remain engaged in the task; 1/3 of the time, he will be bored and frustrated.

Ironic considering you volunteered to coach baseball, where _failing_ 2/3 of the time at the plate is considered a high achievement.

Re: Ask HN: How has volunteering helped you grow?

#70

Post by timpark »

The most fulfillment would be where it actually gets results. The first hackathon I went to, I made a simple app according to specifications. I was willing to polish up some features after the event and put it into production, but multiple emails to the organization's contact went unanswered.

I almost didn't attend the event again, but the second time, my project went into production and is still going. The organization was manually copying data from their donation site into SalesForce, and I wrote a small script to do it daily. (The donation site has a "connector" for SalesForce, but apparently it didn't work for them)

I'm currently doing something longer term with an organization I found on UN Volunteers. I was expecting to add features according to specifications, but they wanted ideas for how to improve the app. How about more content? "We don't want to add more content." How about multilanguage support? I was thinking I'd be adding one or two languages, and suddenly he has 19 translators lined up. sigh

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