OUR OPINION: CAN YOU HELP? Volunteering vital to Valley
First Posted:
If you volunteer in this community, thank you.
Without you and like-minded residents, everyday activities in the Greater Wyoming Valley would sputter, or stop, and the place would seem heartless. Your contributions, while not easily quantified, have both a dollar value and a social one, saving organizations money in labor costs, serving the greater good and setting the example of what’s possible when area residents demonstrate their humanity.
Your efforts matter – even, or maybe especially, when those efforts are largely unseen and unheralded.
During National Volunteer Week, an awareness-raising campaign begun 40 years ago and promoted by the Points of Light organization, we join others in recognizing all those individuals who look beyond themselves: the conservation club members in Nanticoke who pluck litter from local stream banks, the youth baseball coaches in Plymouth, the Scout leaders in Dallas and so on. Although Volunteer Week continues only through Saturday, your collective efforts are ceaseless. And they should compel other people to consider how they, too, can help, and how Luzerne County would be lessened without devoted volunteers toiling around the clock.
Before 9 a.m. most weekdays, a volunteer driver for the American Cancer Society’s Road to Recovery program is shuttling patients to Pierce Street, Kingston, or elsewhere for doctor’s appointments.
Around 10 a.m., volunteers trickle in to public libraries. At sites such as the Osterhout Free Library in Wilkes-Barre, they sort and shelve books and DVDs or handle other duties that promote learning and enjoyment.
By 11 a.m., the volunteers who orchestrate the Al Beech/West Side Food Pantry, in Kingston, have packed peanut butter and other staples in boxes and overseen the week’s scheduled food distribution.
At noon, volunteer cooks and servers for the St. Vincent de Paul Kitchen, in downtown Wilkes-Barre, are filling the plates of hungry guests.
Toward 3 p.m., school-age children filter inside the McGlynn Learning Center at Wilkes-Barre’s Boulevard Townhomes, where volunteer tutors help them with homework assignments and arrange safe activities.
Throughout the evening, volunteers lend their expertise and their emotional support to people seeking refuge at the Domestic Violence Service Center and area homeless shelters. Meanwhile, no matter the hour of the day or night, volunteer firefighters from Sweet Valley to Mountain Top, Avoca to Ashley, stand ready to come to the rescue. At virtually all hours, seven days a week, volunteers blanket the region, powering projects for trails associations, youth sports leagues, religious organizations, arts groups and civic clubs.
These caring people in Luzerne and Wyoming counties volunteer for the betterment of their neighborhoods and the people within them not because they need to, but by choice. They’re drawn by duty, or obligation, or a search for greater purpose, or a belief in God, or an escape, or a conviction in the soul.
The same things, perhaps, that call to you.
Are you ready to lend a hand?
