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Step Up: Turning a Day of Service Into a Habit

By Catherine Lincoln | Wednesday, January 21, 2009 12:37 PM ET

Comments (7)

By Catherine Lincoln Monday's National Day of Service was an enormous success, with tens of thousands of volunteers and 13,000 service projects registered with USAService, the Renew America Together website. From loading bags at food banks, to cleaning up neighborhoods and painting schools, people found ways to pitch in and connect with their fellow citizens. All of this was in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. and at the request of now-President Barack Obama, who led by example. In fact, he and his wife Michelle did more than their fair share of volunteering in the Washington D.C. area. Obama's day started at Walter Reed Army Medical Center where he visited with 14 injured veterans who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He and Martin Luther King III then moved on to paint walls at the Sasha Bruce House, a shelter for homeless teens, demonstrating the enviable roller technique he learned at a $4/hour summer job when he was 17. And Obama kept going! He joined Michelle at Calvin Coolidge High School where they thanked 300 volunteers who were writing letters and decorating blankets to send to U.S. troops overseas. While watching yesterday's inauguration, and hearing Obama's inspiring words about responsibility and action, I was amazed yet again at his willingness to roll up his sleeves and do the hard work -- whether it's fixing our budget or painting walls. It makes me want to be like him! As one person said on Twitter, Obama's magic is that he makes you want to stand up and do something to help right this minute. My husband and I watched the speech again over dinner. Galvanized by Obama's call to service even more the second time around, we decided to make our contribution to "renew America" an ongoing habit by setting aside one Saturday every month to volunteer. Our first stop: the Presidio Stewardship Program, doing "habitat restoration" (a.k.a. weeding). Humble work, good cause, nice people, in a breath-taking setting, under the Golden Gate Bridge. We expect it to be a great day, as long as it doesn't rain! Even if it does, we'll be bundled up and out there, kicking off our new habit. The powerful change sweeping the nation is thrilling and contagious. The best part is that you can help steer it, setting the direction we take for the next generation. Say "Yes!" to the call, get involved, and go make a difference!

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Cat Lincoln is a Prius-driving writer and photographer based in San Francisco.

Comments (7)

Aerik Sylvan

304 days ago

The new USAService.org website is a fine idea, but it’s missing solving the real problem. There are already a ton of websites with volunteer opportunities (look at http://www.usaservice.org/page/content/opportunities/ to get a sample of the number of them) - the real problem is that if you wanted to volunteer, you might have to spend a bunch of time searching all those websites, and you’d give up after awhile. That’s the problem that needs to be solved.

If all those websites would share their information with each other, then a search on any one of them would let you find the relevant results from all of them.

This is not far-fetched, this can easily be done using existing standards (similar to RSS). What needs to happen is for a large number of these websites to adopt this model, and cooperate. This idea is *my* answer to the call to service: I’m promoting this idea that we don’t need more websites; we need the websites to share information about service opportunities.

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Steve Enders

303 days ago

Hey Aerik - your point is a great one. We at Tonic are committed to making it easier for people to get involved. You'll be hearing a lot about that on this site in coming weeks and months. To your point, we hope we're not just another site pointing people to other sites with opportunities, but rather be a helpful place where people can go to easily get involved with a variety of causes. Stay tuned - hopefully you won't be disappointed.

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Aerik

303 days ago

Hi Steve,
Thanks - but upon reading your comments, I've got to continue to make my point: for websites who really want to emphasize service opportunities, the strategy of "get people to come here to find good stuff" is inappropriate.

Certainly plenty of websites *should* "get people to come here to find good stuff" because it is their business or mission to get attention to the content of the website, BUT, for websites who's mission it is to publish service opportunities, they are doing a disservice by not making the information (about the opportunities) as accessible as possible. That means publishing it in computer parsable formats and encouraging other websites to aggregate and redistribute that content.

Think of it like this: if volunteermatch, USAService, craigslist, onebrick, and all those many other websites published their opportunities marked up in xml, you could aggregate them all in one place and search them. *Each* of those websites could have *all* the service opportunities. If it got big enough, Google would build a vertical search for it (like they have for news, images, and shopping). That's the vision: maximum visibility for all the service opportunities.

Best Regards,
Aerik

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Cat Lincoln

303 days ago

Hi Aerik - I totally agree, it's mind-boggling trying to sort through all of the opportunities. I love your idea about sharing opportunities across websites! If a brilliant programmer is out there reading, please put your mind to this technology puzzle.

In the meantime, I think Volunteer Match does the best job of aggregating opportunities, and their site is easy to navigate.

And really, what a cool problem to have -- too many opportunities to volunteer!

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Aerik

302 days ago

Hi Cat,

You put out a call to "a brilliant programmer" - but it's not needed. You can do this using existing technology. It's not even hard, once the websites publish their content using some XML. I've written a proof-of-concept program at eventfeed.org that works exactly as I have proposed. What we need now is for more websites to publish their information in computer-readable formats.

Best Regards,
Aerik

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Cat Lincoln

302 days ago

Hi Aerik - thanks so much for taking the time to dig a little deeper into this topic. I'd hadn't given much thought to aggregating this type of information, never mind how to improve distribution.

I just wrote to a contact at Volunteer Match and asked him to weigh in. Who knows? Maybe our "conversations" will get something big rolling!

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Aerik Sylvan

301 days ago

I've actually been posting on every article about usaservice.org I can find, or writing letters to the editor if it's a newspaper article. Getting "something big rolling" is *exactly* the goal :-)

I've also sent notes directly at the usaservice.org website, and called their 800 number (and left a message). If you can think of any stones I haven't turned, I'd love to hear about them.

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