by Deborah Armstrong
You may be a confident blind person, able to reduce your disability to a minor nuisance that you rarely think about.
You may be new to sight loss and wonder how you will ever cope with diminishing sight or lack thereof.
You may have been blind all your life, but discouraged by friends and family to ever reach beyond boundaries established by others.
I’d like to challenge you, no matter how you view your blindness, that volunteering is the way toward becoming more confident, more flexible and just more the person you dream of becoming.
As a full-time valued employee, I see myself as very competent. I was taken down a peg yesterday, when I had to apologize in a volunteer job for some conduct that was seen as unprofessional. It reminded me how, at times, I can be thoughtless and impulsive. The silver lining here was that as a volunteer, my slip will be overlooked, and my continued contributions will still be requested and appreciated. In my paid job, now, I’ll be more careful to think before I speak.
So that’s one advantage of volunteering: you can make mistakes and learn from them. And a mistake can be something as simple as failing to ask for help when trying to master a new skill, or depending on too much help when you could have accomplished a task on your own.
All disabled folks need to learn the delicate balance between independence and interdependence, learning when it’s more efficient to get assistance, and when requests for assistance limit you and may also limit co-workers who must allocate time to help you. Volunteer work is a safe place to explore that balance.
Volunteer work is also a great opportunity to master new skills. Whether you enter data on a computer, answer phones, take messages, interact with the public, write articles, help in the kitchen, foster pets, babysit children, visit the homebound, fold newsletters, develop websites or collect trash, you are using a skill you think you know well already or still must master. For example, if the job is delivering mail inside a facility but everyone stops you to chat, even if you know how to deliver mail, you will need to learn how to be polite so you can move on to the next department eagerly awaiting their mail. If you are a tech genius and develop a website for a client, you still must learn how to listen to the client’s needs before implementing them, and you must learn how to explain when you cannot do something they requested.
And if you are no tech genius, an employer may not be interested in paying you to get up to speed. But as a volunteer, you may find a welcoming environment that won’t mind you learning on the job.
And this on-the-job learning will make you employable. If you made appointments, scheduled meetings and took accurate messages as a volunteer, you are more likely to get hired as an administrative assistant. If you taught recreation classes to teens or computer classes to seniors, you have proven experience in those fields. If you serve on boards and committees, you demonstrate commitment, organizational ability and community involvement, the soft skills employers are seeking.
And if you are retired, so becoming employable holds no interest for you, volunteering is a way to get out of the house, to make friends, and to have a good time. Having good friends means there are people to call on when you need help, for example, if you need an emergency ride to your vet. But it also gives you the chance to be helpful to others, such as when a friend is laid up and unable to cook. Too many seniors are lonely, and this does not need to be your fate.
I have held many volunteer jobs, including newsletter editor, computer programmer, cook, pet therapy handler, pet adoption coordinator, board member, access technology teacher, receptionist, Braille producer, committee secretary, dog walker, house-sitter, and work that involved dirty jobs like dusting and scrubbing. I am sure that people I met along the way who would never have thought of hiring a blind person before were able to change their own misconceptions.
So, volunteer work gives you a chance to oppose the prejudice our society has against the blind. When you show folks what you can do, and when you find ways to teach people how to treat you with respect, you are advocating for all of us, gently, but persistently.