Saturday, June 22, 2013

100 Volunteer Hours

Today I spent the afternoon in some volunteer work I needed to catch up on. I am the editor for the Seattle Association for Women in Science (AWIS) newsletter, which means that at least quarterly, I have to sit down and edit some documents, exchange flurries of emails and get some files organized. It's not unlike my real job (as a writer), and it's nice to be able to schedule it for when I have time. What I'm getting at here, is this was a fairly routine experience.

And as I was updating the totals on my spreadsheet (which I love doing), I noticed it updated to 104 hours. That's a lot of time! And since what I really love about the spreadsheet are the metrics, let me break it down for you. From the totals on the thermometer (currently $7,345.27), which is combined hours and dollars, about half of that is hours, and half dollars. About 57 of those hours, I've been involved in (I will track combined hours for something Matt & I or myself and others do, so it's less lines on the spreadsheet).

Just for the record, I think we can compare the amount of volunteer time I've racked up this year to the amount of volunteer time I did last year, which was basically only my work with AWIS. Or ~4 hours a month. In the 5 months since I started tracking, I've basically doubled my own efforts, and some how talked others into matching my volunteer efforts.  Go us!

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That being said, having spent a sunny Saturday in my office, I've got to get serious about finding some outdoor volunteer opportunities. And it looks like the pub crawl is going to fall through- but I'd like to get a group together for some type of volunteer project: trail maintenance? flash mob at the blood bank? 5K? I'm not sure, so if you have ideas, let me know.

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