Volunteering anywhere not only in Thailand will require time, effort and coordination. Scheduled event in our calendar doesn’t require high professional skills but rather an easy way to learn activities where everyone will enjoy doing on weekends. Our community supports organizations that involves building, planting, entertaining, mentoring, and some handcrafts in order to preserve, conserve and empower the environment, animals and the humanity.
Yes, most of the events in this community involve a fee for the grounds of traveling into places where volunteering takes place. Organizations arrange the transportation and food making it more convenient to participants (primarily Baandinthai) and entail an advance payment to save seats. The events are recurring so a portion from these fees also goes to the rental of materials and tools as it needs replenishment when broken. For events where we independently organize (Baan Gerda trips), the participation cost doesn’t go to the charity as a donation per se, but to every expense needed for the trip like the van rental, food, materials for the activities and gifts.
We also have non-paid volunteering but requires commitment. It takes some hours of training, meetings and coordination where your time and dedication is of high importance. This involves attending to a cat shelter, answering phone calls and twining/locking rubber bands on a daily, weekly or hourly basis.
To see the bird’s eye view of our activities, please check this link as a reference: Bangkok Volunteers Events
We also recommend weekday activities where you can contribute your time to the underprivileged children of Khlong Toey by spending a day(s) in child centers managed by Foundation for Slum Child Care and the Mercy Centre . You can contact them anytime thru email or by phone and they have a very friendly staff and coordinators who can speak English and respond to your queries.
Our calendar schedule volunteering activities on weekends only and depends on the invitation from the organization and availability of an event host. This is because most of the members of our community are working full-time the whole week including the organizer herself *wink*. Events are posted 2-3 weeks ahead of the date and notices are sent from time to time to remind everyone (who clicked “Yes” in the RSVP list) of their participation.
All members are invited to join thru an email sent to their inboxes (the email account they used to sign-up in Meetup.com), or you can bookmark our community in your browser and check for the upcoming events. If you have more than 10 Meetup memberships I guess it will be difficult for you to locate all invitations unless you modify your email settings. Please sign-up on the event only on your availability and take time to change its status or notify us if you changed your mind, we declare No-Show in this group. Volunteering as the word itself should be taken literally. Participations should be purely based on a person’s free will, not as a favor or an intention to please and without a strand of sacrifice on your professional and mostly family/personal life. Just like any other activity or interest, it should be practiced by a person who simply enjoys doing it. It is similar to watching a movie, dining or playing any outdoor games like running and badminton. Whatever we do defines us, but most importantly it should make us happy as this is the only tangible cost of volunteering.
This group is nothing without the support of the VOLUNTEERS who contributed their best since this community stretched its muscles. Thank you very much and let’s welcome the year with more weekend activities to learn, work, empower and have fun while giving back to the society.
Happy New Year to all!
Cel
Organizer