A new year means new opportunities to make a difference in the community, and the United Way of Southwest Michigan is inviting everyone to check out Volunteer United, its online portal to all sorts of ways a person can help.
The United Way’s Maria Springs tells us the portal is a one-stop shop to request help, offer help, and track activity.
“Organizations can sign up for free and make their profile and it gives them some options to share kind of what they do in their work, their mission statements and the work that they would like to get done in our area,” Springs said. “So it’s a really nice and easy way for people to sign up right on the website so you can track your volunteer information.”
Springs says a volunteer can sign up to help with big events and smaller, more routine tasks.
“There’s a lot of ongoing needs on there, whether that is like maintenance work, there’s indoor and outdoor opportunities too, which are nice. Any like office cleanup that people need to do or special events. So there’s a lot of different opportunities. And there’s also a lot of recurring needs, say for food pantries, like monthly food drives or weekly events as well.”
Springs says a volunteer could sign up to help out at a church a few hours a week, or they could sign up for a major program like Rake a Difference. She says Volunteer United can help with all of those things, noting it organized more than 1,400 people for Rake a Difference back in November.
The website is Volunteer.UWSM.org.
