When I was a young I had a lot of opportunities to volunteer with my church youth group and with my father. Volunteering became one of my favorite activities to do with my youth group and some of the most memorable experiences with my father. If you are looking for a way to improve your father son relationship then volunteering is the perfect solution for you.
By volunteering you not only help the people, community, animals, or environment, but you also help yourself and your son gain compassion and empathy for others. In a report by the National & Community Service they found, “a strong relationship between volunteering and health: those who volunteer have lower mortality rates, greater functional ability, and lower rates of depression later in life than those who do not volunteer.”
Not only will you be strengthening your father son relationship by volunteering, but you will also be strengthening your physical and mental health. Below is a list of 10 incredible father son volunteering opportunities.
1. Care Package
A great way to volunteer with your son could be to put together care packages. There are many different types of care packages you can make for someone in need. You could put together packages for soldiers, children in the hospital, the elderly in a nursing home, disaster relief, and other countries in need.
Sending care packages to soldiers in the armed forces is a great way to give back. Everyday soldiers are serving their country and giving back to us. They leave their families and homes to put themselves in harms way for their country. Many of them don’t receive anything from friends or families back home, and your care package could be just the boost they need to keep going.
A great recourse to use for sending care packages to the troops is anysoldier.com. This resource was created because of a family that was sending care packages to their son serving in Iraq. Their son realized that there was a lot of soldiers that never got any care packages so he asked his parents to start sending more. They created this resource in order to send care packages to those soldiers that don’t normally get anything.
If your son is young, you could have him draw pictures for the service men and women. They love getting drawings and pictures from supporters back home.
Another one of the things that they request is beanie babies. The soldiers give out beanies babies to local children when they are out on patrol.
Another care package that you could put together is an activity box for a child in the hospital. An activity box could really lift a childs spirit when they are fighting for their life. A great resource for putting together an activity box is thejaredbox.com.
Here you will be able to choose whether you want to make a box for a girl or a boy and specify an age group for the child. It will walk you through step by step how to make an activity box. There is a suggested toy list that will help you choose what to put in the activity boxes from stickers to board games. You can have your son write a personalized note and place it in the box. Then you can decorate the outside of the box with stickers and labels to really jazz it up.
At thejaredbox.com you can also find hospitals in your area that will accept the activity box. Once you have it all put together you can drive it to the hospital and drop it off. This will be a really meaningful volunteer opportunity for your son.
If you’re short on time then another great volunteer opportunity you could do with your son is to give back to the elderly by making them birthday cards. When I was young, there was a nursing home I would go to with my youth group. We would sing and talk with the elderly every month.
From the time I spent going there, I realized that a lot of the elderly there never had any family members come visit them. All they really had was the people that lived and worked at the nursing home. They loved it when we would come by and sing to them. Taking your son to a nursing home to hand out birthday cards or holiday cards would really excite those receiving them.
Along with giving back to others, your son would also gain a lot of honorary grandparents from this experience. You may even meet some people through this experience that you go visit for years to come. All you need to do is make a phone call to a local nursing home and tell them your idea. They’ll tell you a good time to come and how many birthdays are that month. This has got to be one of the best ways to spend a Sunday afternoon with your son.
2. Give With Your Talents
If you work in some sort of a trade or are good at working with your hands, then a great father son volunteering opportunity would be to use your talents to help others in the need. You could talk with your church leader, crisis centers, or even a local scouting troop to find someone in need.
My father was in the automotive repair industry and the first transmission I ever built with him was for someone in need. A local man that had fallen down on his luck and my father helped him out by fixing his truck for him for free. I helped my father on many occasions fix peoples vehicles that were in need. It felt really good to use our talents to help out others.
When you think about the talents you could use to give back people often just go to mechanics, electricians, plumbers, framers, painters, and basically every trade you can think of.
But you can give back to others with your son even if your talent isn’t a trade. Why not help someone in need repair their computer, fix someones teeth so they have confidence to go to a job interview, give financial advice to help someone get out of debt, or help represent someone in the court of law. We are all given talents and each of us has something special that we can use to give back to others.
3. Donate
Donating to charitable organizations is a great trait that you can instill in your son. Something that you could do with your son is help him earn some money that he can donate to a charity. You could help him with a lemonade stand, paper route, mowing lawns, garage sale, or whatever the two of you come up with to earn money.
Once they earn the money from their hard work then you can teach them that a portion of what they worked hard for they could use to donate to charity to help others. You could spend time together researching reputable charities and let your son pick the charity that he wants to donate his hard earned money too.
By helping your son to earn the money on his own the donation that he makes will have more meaning since he spent his time and energy to make the money. That will be a lot more memorable than just letting your son pick a charity and paying for it yourself.
4. Secret Service
Giving service is even more meaningful and rewarding when the people receiving the service don’t know that you did it for them. One of the ways that you could do this is by dropping food off on their doorstep. Your son will love trying to ring the door bell and run off without getting caught.
Instead of focusing on gifts for themselves at Christmas, you could get presents and food for a family in need. If you live in a region that gets snow in the winter you could shovel snow for the elderly before they get up in the morning. If you know of a family in need you could organize a fund raiser to help them get back on their feet. Doing good for others without recognition is an incredibly rewarding feeling.
5. Clean Up Your Community
Why not spend some quality time with your son by cleaning up a local park or ocean. You could even have your son help you organize a local community pick up. You can use this website at usa.gov to find your local parks and recreation department.
Contact them and tell them the area you want to clean up and they will give you more information and possibly supplies to help you clean up the area. They will also let you know if there are any permits required for what you plan to do. Have your son help you spread the word by contacting members of the community to ask for their help in cleaning up the community.
6. Clean Up Your Forest
Another great way to clean up the environment is to volunteer with the national forest service. There are a lot of different volunteer opportunities with the forest service for every person and even kids.
The forest service really depends on volunteers in the Forest Service: A Guide for Volunteers it says, “the Forest Service has relied on volunteers to maintain trails, serve as hosts at campgrounds, and perform many other valuable services. Without volunteers, these services would not be performed as well or might not be performed at all.” To volunteer with the forest service you could call your local forest service office, or go to this forest service site to contact your local volunteer coordinator.
7. Volunteer At A Local Animal Shelter
Your son can help out animals no matter how old he is. Call up your local animal shelters and ask them if you can come volunteer with your son. Something as simple as handing out treats or scratching a dogs belly will show those animals that there are people that care.
Another organization that you could contact to help animals in need is the Safe Haven Humane Society. There are a variety of volunteer opportunities for you and your son at the Safe Haven Humane Society. You could socialize with dogs or cats. Living in a shelter can be a really stressful environment for an animal. Having the social interaction and love from a person can really help them feel happy.
Your son could also improve his reading and self confidence by reading aloud to dogs and cats. You could also do a father son fund raiser to raise money for an organization dedicated to helping animals. What are you waiting for? Grab your son and go help an animal in need.
8. Volunteer Abroad
Have you been saving for an epic father son vacation? Instead of sun tanning on a beach somewhere why not travel to another country to help others in need. A great resource you can use to find out more information on volunteering abroad is volunteerhq.org
9. Minimize
I’m sure if you go through your house you will found an abundance of clothes, toys, books, kitchenware, and electronics that you haven’t used in a long time. You could spend a weekend going through your house and donating the things that you don’t use to the Goodwill or the Salvation Army. A great show you could watch to get you pumped for minimizing is Tidying Up with Marie Kondo on Netflix.
10. Improve a School
Lots of schools are underfunded or under staffed to do upkeep around the school. Something you could do is, contact some of the local schools in your area to see if you could volunteer to pull weeds around the school, plant some bushes or trees, do some painting, or whatever they need done. Every time you drive by or visit the school it will give you and your son some pride knowing that you did something to help improve your community.
There you go 10 incredible father son volunteer ideas to spread some kindness out into the world. It’s people like you that make this world a great place to live in. So get out there and do some good.