Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/opening-the-doors-to-volunteers/5021934/
Close your eyes for a moment and picture a volunteer in an early childhood program. (Okay, open them!) Who did you see? Was he in a rocking chair, reading to a group of children? Was she knitting them hats and gloves to prepare for winter? How about a bank employee coming in to educate the children’s parents about creating personal budgets? While these are certainly traditional roles for volunteers, new ideas about what it means to donate time and skills are opening up new areas for volunteerism!During the 2012-2013 program year, Head Start and Early Head Start classrooms were supported by over 1,230,000 volunteers. About 820,000 of them were parents, which suggests that as many as four in five of the million Head Start and Early Head Start students had a parent volunteer last year, a sizable accomplishment and a reflection of how Head Start programs welcome parents into classrooms as their children’s first teachers. But what about the other 410,000 volunteers? Certainly some are community members who’ve visited classrooms to read with children and participate in classroom activities, but others are professionals who come to share their own skills with the program as a whole. Activities they’ve undertaken include:
• helping ...