【推荐1】Volunteer Day

What better way is there to enjoy your own hobbies while helping others at the same? Come to Volunteer Day and choose which activity you’d like to join for the day.

See below for a list of volunteer opportunities for Volunteer Day so you can begin thinking about which activity you might want to join.

A list of volunteer activities:

Plant flowers: Do you enjoy being outside in nature? City Parks Association has many great opportunities for people who love to be outdoors. Help plant flowers and bushes in city parks, help lay paths at Cave Springs Park, or help pick up rubbish around the river banks. These activities are very active, so remember to be prepared with plenty of drinking water!

Play with animals: Do you love animals? Lovely Friends is an organization that visits local animal shelters and provides volunteers to spend time with the animals while their cages are being cleaned. Play with puppies, snuggle with cats, or hand-feed rabbits.

Paint houses: Do you enjoy making art? If so, this volunteer opportunity might be just right for you! Happy Homes is a local organization that provides home repairs for needy people in the form of painting. For elderly or physically disabled people who cannot do repairs to their homes, Happy Homes provides volunteer painters to repaint old homes, outside or in. Happy Homes also provides painters to create beautiful wall paintings inside schools or community centers.

【推荐3】Disasters are like a mirror. They show both our bright and dark sides, as individuals and as a society. As citizens in China and beyond continue to fight against the coronavirus(新冠状病毒),the daily lives of many have gone through changes - from simple routine adjustments to complete devotion from volunteers.

People have consciously chosen to stay at home to prevent further human-to-human spread. However, that didn't stop employees and students from working and studying at home. On Feb 17, the scheduled first school day, many teachers started to give online lessons. Bored at home, many people began to learn new things to fill their newly-found time, such as baking or knitting.

The film named Contagion,2011 shows the worst-case that might happen after a worldwide epidemic. Fortunately, the situation in China couldn't be more different than the movie. Rather than violence and food shortage, everything has worked out rather well in China so far.

Scientists isolated (分离) the first virus strain, more than 30,000 medical workers in over 100 medical teams gathered and thousands of construction workers came to build hospitals in Wuhan, Hubei province. Thousands of volunteers are working nonstop to help deliver supplies and assist the affected regions.

Sociologists once debated whether volunteer service is common to see around the world. Indeed, more than 30 years of research—exploring disasters in Europe, Asia, and America—confirmed that the need to help is universal wherever disaster strikes.

“It's normal that when disasters happen, people will fall into panic. In reality, we're more likely to rush in to help others than run them over to save ourselves,” wrote American psychologist Kelly Caldwell in Pacific Standard. “It's an exercise in mass healing.”