3 Volunteer Ideas That Could Open Your Child’s Eyes

Volunteering not only offers an amazing opportunity to be the hands and feet of Jesus, but it can also be a great learning experience. Though there are literally thousands of places you could volunteer, here are three volunteer ideas that could open your child’s eyes (and your own) to see the daily circumstances of neighbors in your community and how they vary from your own.

Create Packaged Meals to Feed a Starving Child
Have you ever tried to get your child to finish her plate at supper by telling her that there are children starving in other places in the world? For children who get three meals a day on top of snacks, the concept of constant hunger can be difficult to comprehend. However, before creating an assembly line (with a number of tasks children can easily do) to create a food package, volunteers at Kids Against Hunger watch a video of children in Haiti eating dirt cookies made from butter, salt, and yes, mud. Each food package provides six nutritious-rich servings of a mixture of rice, soy, vitamins, flavoring, and vegetables at a cost of only 25 cents per serving. Kids Against Hunger has locations in 22 states, as well as Canada.

Serve Lunch for the Working Poor
Every workday, your child likely sees one or two parents leave your house for work with a homemade lunch or plenty of money in their pockets to eat out at lunch. They may not know, however, that there are many people who head to a temporary employment agency each morning with no lunch in hand and no guarantee of a paycheck at the end of the day. Because of this, a program in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, named Lunch Is Served began a mission to deliver free brown sack lunches to the working poor. In 2014, they delivered over 28,000 meals. Two times a week, adult and child volunteers meet at a local church to pack lunches consisting of a meat and cheese sandwich, a breakfast bar, a fruit cup, something salty, and a note of encouragement. Perhaps your church could partner with a temporary labor company in your hometown.

Wrap Gifts for Children from Broken Families
When children are blessed to grow up in a family where Mom and Dad love each other deeply, it’s hard to believe that child custody exchange centers are needed in this world. Yet, to some children, these places are safe houses for supervised visitations with their non-custodial parent or for exchanges of custody to ensure that children don’t have to witness conflict between their Mom and Dad. Donations of new or lightly used toys and stuffed animals to these exchange centers can be especially meaningful for these children caught in the middle. Organize a collection for a custody exchange center near your community and wrap the parents to put a little extra joy in a child’s life.