There’s been a lot of new stuff going on lately, some of which I can tell you about here.

I’ve volunteering with an AIDS outreach group called ACTION (an acronym which stands for AIDS CareTeams In Our Neighborhoods.) The Careteam method of volunteering is a simple and conducive way to allow busy people to participate in helping those who could use a hand - just a little bit at a time. Essentially, a “careteam” is comprised of 5-10 individuals who are focused on one “partner” which has specific needs that some member of the team could address at any given time. In ACTION’s case, all the partners are HIV positive (though not necessarily with advanced disease) and may have developed conditions where they might need a lift to the clinic or just some tasty treats dropped off because they aren’t able to run superfluous errands. Or, maybe they would just appreciate some folks to hang out with. The idea is that if each member can pay a the partner a visit every once in a while (and that one of us would be able to handle an emergency situation if it came up) the care partner will have a much stronger support structure than existed previously. Now, clearly dedicating 10 people to one needy partner does not scale well - but doing something is so much better than doing nothing in these cases.

The experience has been a serious dose of “heavy stuff” as I get more involved, but there’s been a lot of surprises along the way. The first of which is how easy it is to make a little bit of time for someone who really appreciates your presence. The second is that the other individuals with ACTION are so cool, interesting, and aware that it hardly feels like a sacrifice to give time to a volunteer organization. Lastly, though ACTION is a secular organization, it does attract a number of religious or stongly spiritual people. What all of these people seem to have in common is how open-minded they are - it goes beyond tolerance to actually embracing others who are different. That is a rare thing.

I realize all of us are busy - but I feel like volunteering is something that each of us could do just a little bit of, no matter how full our calendar’s seem. You would be suprised how self-serving this is just from the satisfaction you take in the experience! I’m hoping to find an organization like this when I land in the next place a few months from now.

[tags]action, careteam[/tags]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 9:57 pm and is filed under World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.