ESSAY COMPETITION

This is the essay of Michal Adami, a Slovak student, who written this essay about volunteering. Read and enjoy it:)
The best things in life are free…
Who pleasure gives, shall joy receive…
Think about being a volunteer! There are several definitions of volunteering and a volunteer itself. Generaly a volunteer (latin - voluntarious – willing) is a person who invests his free time, energy, knowledge and abilities to do some kind of activity without being paid for it. Reward for volunteering is spiritual, what means that a volunteer gets the character and professional growth, good feelings, sometimes new friendships and life experiences.
You can be a volunteer almost everywhere, you can help people in your neighbourhood, the area where you live or work, anywhere. For example, you can help your sick neighbour with shopping, tidying up in front of your flat, house or in the park. Everybody has abilities and energy to do some kind of voluntary activity. It depends only on how willing and able the person is to do a certain service.
Another way of voluntary activities are organized by the non-governmental, public and non- profitable organizations or schools and churches. So that we can divide volunteering into severel categories:
• Volutary activities: various irregular activities of people for various organizations based on verbal agreement.
• Voluntary services: activities with clear time bounds, aim, content, tasks, legislation and social protection based on verbal or written agreement.
• Voluntary self-help: mutual help beetwen neighbours, group of children and youth and interest groups that is based on reciprocal agreement out of the organization.
Voluntary organizations are organizations that are based on voluntary work and cannot operate without volunterees. Voluntary organizations engage various types of areas of voluntering according to aimed groups for example: social culture, ecology tasks and so on. Then they are devided according to local, regional, national and worldwide level and according to time of the activity it could be one-shot, regular longterm or occasional co-operation. Based on the aimed group and area of work they make conditions and rules collaborating with volunteers. Altogether they organize volunteersthemselves and thein activities. The perfect example of voluntary organization is GREENPEACE.
There are barriers of volunteering. Voluntary work and activities are still realized by our public as something special. The main barrier of developing the voluntary work is passivity during searching and gaining volunteers. Some other barriers are:
bad or not sufficient organization of volunteers, no demand for volunteers, concerns from injury, load pattern and much more..
And what supports volunteers? There are a lot of supporting moments:
• They have feeling that they are evaluating
• They have hope for a change and progress
• They gain appreciation from public either personally
• They realize that they help mean something
• They have feeling of fellowship and teamwork

• And much more...
In these times of wars,world hunger,natural disasters etc. necessity for voluntary work is much more noticable than in the past. This is what the EU realizes and set the year 2011 as the European Year of Volunteering. The EU is trying to mobilize people by doing campaigns which inform how to become a volunteer and what advangates the status of the volunteer has. If you are able and have a chance to do some voluntary work – try it. You will see that even the good feeling of helping someone is worth it! The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he is able to receive.