Let's volunteer in Ghana - #volunteeringh

We at GhanaThink believe strongly in our mission: mobilize and organize talent for the primary benefit of Ghana and our vision: build a critical mass of patriotic, passionate, positive, proactive, progressive and productive young Ghanaians. Our mission is very broad so there are so many things we can do but we would only do what's easiest for us to succeed at given our state and situation . We started GhanaThink with the spirit of volunteerism. To this day, GhanaThink is run by 100+ volunteer members and labour, including myself. Volunteeringh opportunities with us exist for all Barcamps we organize. Aside the members, we normally have a group of volunteers per each local team, and if we need more, we look for some. Currently, we normally get new volunteers through our community - Konnect, etc or people who we have noted who want to volunteer with us.

Volunteerism is when people decide to help get something done to help others without being paid for it. That's how I can define it without looking that the dictionary hehe. Don't take my word over the dictionary's please 🤣. Anyone can volunteer. It's not for a category of people. The beauty of volunteerism is that in majority of volunteer situations, you don't need to be skilled in something to volunteer.

We started the National Volunteer Day in 2013 where people join volunteer activities around Ghana. That created our Ghana Volunteer Program which matches volunteers with volunteer opportunities. In the Ghana Volunteer Program Facebook group, people share volunteer opportunities from time to time, and vice versa. We also sign up volunteers that we send opportunities to. Sign up or share with others - https://bit.ly/volunteeringhsignup

For the first National Volunteer Day in Ghana in September 2013, many young people who were not professional painters joined a GhanaThink member, Eleanor Asare, to paint the LaBawaleshie school in Accra over 2 days. A couple of people taught them how to paint well and they all followed. For this in 2013, there were 34 activities, 233+ volunteers, 11 towns, 7 regions, 1000s of beneficiaries. Many people in Ghana do not volunteer while some volunteer on occasion. Some organizations in Ghana organize regular volunteer activities. Founder’s Day celebrates our founders who worked for Ghana. We have turned it into National Volunteer Day. Around September 21, we come together and volunteer all over Ghana. Volunteering helps many people in Ghana to give back to society, network and build skills. Even more importantly, they gain and build experience and soft skills valuable for employment and personal development.

We can effectively say that having roles and positions in clubs and societies in high schools and universities count as volunteering. When I was in Presec, the volunteer word wasnt top of mind. But I volunteered there a lot. I also got involved in a number of clubs, prominent among them were the Editorial Board and the Quiz, Writers and Debaters Club. All of these would count as volunteering. As protocol prefect, my role/job was to organize and lead Presec delegations to events outside of school, organize and oversee major events in Presec and be the guardian of all clubs and societies in the school. In no time, I was everywhere. The end does justify the means. By the time I was applying to MIT, I had my first CV, with several activities I had participated in, and how I had led.

While at MIT, I volunteered a lot with the African Students Association. I wasnt keen on having positions, I did a lot of things as a common member. I did have positions in MIT-AITI & MIT-EASE where I had positions, mostly because each didnt have that many people involved like ASA. MIT-AITI gave me the opportunity to get a free flight home to Ghana, to run a programming and entrepreneurship course for students in Ghana. What I learnt from doing that has proved very useful through the years. It was a great thing to add to my CV, proving useful in jobs with Google and various consulting gigs.

MIT-EASE gave me the opportunity to learn how to sell. We bought African crafts and sold them to people in the US to raise money to give scholarships to JSS students in Ghana. Showcasing the impact we made proved useful in convincing various organizations of what I could do, around social impact for them. These were student organizations. I was so happy with what we could achieve as students, just leveraging the community and network within MIT. It really inspired me and drives me within GhanaThink to look at how much we can achieve as youth.

I started doing giving free rides to people in 2012 in Accra alongside the main guy who was driving me while I was working for Google. My main mentor who is also a cofounder of GhanaThink said this after we all visited Obour & MUSIGA. We at Google helped them with a few things and Paa Kwesi Imbeah said something along the lines of I've done something for my country today. We discussed how we could have that feeling more often and came up with the 'I Made Ghana Better Today' concept. Free rides became the way we drove this hehe. We named it #IMGBT.

I believe a lot in positive karma. For National Volunteer Day in 2019, I volunteered to drive around Accra, asking to give people free rides to places they were going. I did this over the course of 3 days, I gave about 8 people free rides. Some people refuse the ride, others do. I do that because as I do good for them, good things would also happen to me. I've been doing this 2012, and it has proven true.

Volunteering experience is a major part of CVs. It shows your versatility, interests, potential soft skills, the things that would keep you in a job after your technical skills get you into it. It also shows your networking ability because you tend to work with more different types of people while volunteering. That comes in handy when people are making recommendations.

One of the easiest ways to volunteer is to gather kids in your neighbourhood and help them with homework, literacy or numeracy. If you teach people things, you tend to get better at knowing those things. Teaching it to kids teaches you several good traits - understanding, patience, etc. Walking into a hospital and asking to volunteer or help says a lot of great things about you if you're willing to learn so you apply what you have learnt instead of coming in and giving instructions only.

Passing your exams very well is not enough to make you very successful. If we agree that schooling in Ghana is very theoretical, then you can get a lot of practice through volunteering. Volunteering proves what you can do, aside what you know. What you can do is extremely important in working professionally and growing your career.

You need to manage your time. Most volunteers don't work fulltime because they're also not paid anyway. Find a good number of hours each week or month to volunteer. Personally, combining both are more important than getting a very good GPA without any volunteering experience at all. Sadly, a lot of people get great GPA because they can chew, pour and pass. The real world doesnt work like that. Lots of different scenarios which call for varied skills and experiences of how to deal with situations. Volunteering puts you in many scenarios to prepare you for those.

I wouldnt recommend organizations who hire based on how you did it in school alone. The best organizations allow creativity and problem solving instead of taking instructions and doing things in one way. There are best practices that are also followed, but with varied experiences, people are able to adapt and implement even better things.

Most people who work with volunteers try to provide TnT, food, etc as well as other benefits they can since they don't pay the volunteers. The more incentives, the more you would likely get out of the volunteers, especially when the tasks are harder, than say painting  Some people select a number of volunteers since they need a certain number or have a limited budget for TnT. Dealing with that means being able to cater for more.

It's best if there are lots of volunteering opportunities so that people choose the ones closest to them. If an organization is getting most of its volunteers for places far from where it is based, that means more money spent on transport and even accommodation, and less funds to really help the beneficiaries. You can always discuss this with the organization you are volunteering with to help cover costs if you don't have the resources.

As a volunteer, you have to tell them why you want to work while not being paid. Try to understand their push back so that when others ask you, you convince them. It's not by force to convince everybody, find your chance and work from there. If they're pushing back on the payment bit, maybe they're not as educated on volunteerism. Sometimes they want to pay you so they can hold you more accountable for something. Since volunteers are not paid, it's normally hard to put them in positions of big responsibility or repercussions if things go wrong, because it is not contractual, formal employment, etc. So best to understand the situation and make good decisions for both parties.

We're the ones we're waiting for. Let's choose to be a part of the solutions when we understand the problems and how we can help. Less talk, more action. Less complaining, more doing. More vim to that. Want to volunteer more or find others who #volunteeringh? Engage us via GhanaThink on social media (Twitter, Facebook & Instragram), send us messages, etc