Written in 2014.
A non-trivial percentage of my time is spent giving back to the community, through volunteer work and fundraising. I currently lead three Girl Scout troops, and also a Cub Scout den. I think giving back to the community is a great thing to do, and it is rewarding and enriching. I get back far more than I put into the effort overall.
Every week I lead at least one Girl Scout meeting and one Cub Scout meeting. That means constantly coming up with new craft and activity ideas that are age appropriate, which gets harder as the kids get older and I’m working across a wider age range. Since the point of the programmes is learning, I find myself learning more about different topics, teaching myself new things and investigating subjects I’d otherwise never look at. It means I stay on top of things and become more involved in the world around me.
I like that both programmes prepare children to face the world, and teach real life skills, organisation and leadership. It’s hard to find many other programmes that start teaching those skills from such an early age.
Yesterday I had a girl using a power saw, and she said she finally got to do things in Girl Scouts that she thought she’d never get to do. You can’t put a price tag on that.
It takes me about eight hours a week on average of volunteer time — except during Girl Scout cookie season, when things get much busier. But the rewards are worth it. Hearing that I made a difference in someone’s life is priceless.
The part I didn’t write down at the time
Eight hours a week is a real number. For a business owner it’s most of a working day, every week, given away.
I want to be honest about that rather than pretend it’s costless, because the version of this conversation that only talks about how rewarding volunteering is doesn’t help anyone decide whether to do it.
It cost me time I did not obviously have. And it was worth it for reasons that took me years to articulate properly.
What volunteering actually did for the business
Not in a transactional way — I wasn’t there to network, and communities can tell instantly when someone is. But the effects were real.
It taught leadership faster than any job I’ve had. Managing volunteers is the hardest management there is. You have no authority, no salary to pay, and nothing to hold over anyone. People turn up because they want to, and they stop when they don’t. If you can get a group of parents to reliably deliver something with no leverage at all, managing employees afterwards feels almost easy.
It kept me learning in public. Working out how to teach something to a nine-year-old exposes gaps in your own understanding immediately. There’s no hiding behind jargon. That habit transfers directly to explaining a business to a client.
It put me in rooms I’d never otherwise have entered. Not as a strategy — as a byproduct. Over years, you end up knowing a lot of people across a community, and they know what you’re like to work with, which is a different and better thing than knowing what you do.
And it was the one part of my week measured in something other than revenue. That matters more than it sounds. Owners who have nothing in their lives being scored differently tend to burn out, and they usually don’t see it coming.
Where it goes wrong
Two honest cautions, because volunteering can absolutely damage a business.
It expands. Volunteer organisations are chronically short of capable people, so anyone who shows up and delivers gets asked to do more. Three troops and a den is how that arithmetic ends up. Saying yes once tends to get treated as permanent availability, and the only defence is deciding your limit before you’re asked rather than after.
It becomes an escape. Volunteering is often more immediately rewarding than running a business. The gratitude arrives faster, the wins are clearer, and nobody sends you an invoice. That makes it an excellent place to hide from a difficult conversation you should be having at work. Worth checking occasionally which one you’re doing.
If you’re deciding
- Pick something you’d do anyway. Not what looks good. The obligation has to be to the thing itself or you’ll resent it by March.
- Set the number before you start. Hours per week, or per month. Write it down. You will be asked for more.
- Take a role that teaches you something. If you’re a finance person, don’t be treasurer. Do the thing you’re bad at, in a setting where being bad at it costs nothing.
- Review it annually. Not as a guilt exercise — genuinely. Commitments that made sense three years ago quietly outlive their purpose.
What about you? What volunteer work do you do?
