Become a Regular: 10 Ways To Show Up For Your Community
For when an afternoon here and there isn't enough anymore and you're ready to become a regular.
You've shown up a few times now. You've felt what it's like to spend a morning making something better and you want to keep that momentum going. Here are 10 ways for you to show up for your community beyond volunteering.
Join a crew for the day
A little more muscle, a single shared day. Good company, real work.
1. Join a community garden workday Find a community garden near you, whether it's a reclaimed lot or a strip behind the school, and show up on a workday. Gardens always need hands for planting, weeding, and harvest, and the regulars will teach you everything as you go. Most run through a local garden network or the parks department, so they're easy to find and glad to see a new face. Come once, and you might leave with a plot of your own to tend.
Time: A morning Commitment: One-time or seasonal Good for: Going solo, all skill levels
2. Bring a skill to a repair day Walk into a repair day and you'll find a folding table, a box of tools, and a line of neighbors holding the broken stuff that's been piling up at home. The idea has a name and a history. The Repair Café started with a single event in an Amsterdam neighborhood in 2009, and there are now thousands around the world, together keeping hundreds of thousands of broken things out of the landfill. If you can mend a lamp, true a bike wheel, or run a sewing machine, you'll send people home with something that works again, and usually a story about how it broke.
Time: Half a day Commitment: One-time Good for: People who are handy
Become someone people can count on
The work that lasts is built on the people who keep showing up. Take the same slot every week and you become part of the reason a project holds together.
3. Tutor at a homework-help table Take the same afternoon each week at a homework-help table in a library or community center, and by October the kids know your name. You don't have to be a teacher. Consistency is most of the job, and a familiar face who's there every Tuesday does more for a struggling reader than any single brilliant lesson.
Time: An afternoon per week Commitment: Weekly Good for: People who like working with children
4. Become a driver for neighbors who can't For a lot of older folks, the hardest part of the week is simply getting to the doctor, getting to the store, or getting a hot meal to the door. Programs like Meals on Wheels run on exactly that: more than 5,000 local programs across the country, most of them leaning on volunteer drivers who bring a meal and, just as much, a few minutes of company and a quick check that everything's alright. Take a regular route, and two hours of your week hands someone back their independence.
Time: A few hours a week Commitment: Ongoing Good for: Anyone with a car
5. Make a cleanup your monthly thing Find a recurring cleanup, the kind that runs the second Saturday of every month at the same spot. Become one of the regulars. A lot of these are organized by local Keep America Beautiful affiliates,, although plenty of them are just a few neighbors with a standing date and a box of trash bags. Showing up the second time is what turns a nice one-off into something the block counts on, and the fixed schedule makes it easy to keep.
Time: A few hours a month Commitment: Monthly Good for: First-timers who want a rhythm
6. Mentor at a weekly reading or tutoring circle Commit to one session a week with a reading or tutoring circle run through a school or library. The kids get help they can count on. You get a front-row seat to a kid going from stuck to sounding out the whole sentence, which is the kind of thing that keeps you coming back.
Time: An hour or two a week Commitment: Weekly Good for: Anyone who likes reading
Show up for the “big days”
Ready for a crowd and a day people will talk about afterward? These turn out the whole neighborhood, and the best ones come back every year. The third Monday in January is the MLK Day of Service, the one federal holiday set aside for exactly this, with group projects in just about every town.
7. Work a citywide cleanup day On a citywide cleanup day, the map gets carved into zones and a team takes each one. The country's largest is Keep America Beautiful's Great American Cleanup, which runs every year between the first day of spring and the first day of summer and pulls in hundreds of thousands of people.
Time: Half a day Commitment: One-time Good for: Crowds, families, first-timers
8. Show up for a build or repair blitz hen a crew rallies to fix up a house, a playground, or a community center over a weekend, they need bodies as much as expertise. There's a national version you can join. The last Saturday of April is National Rebuilding Day, run by Rebuilding Together, a nonprofit that began in 1973 when neighbors in Midland, Texas fixed up a neighbor's house, and now turns out close to 100,000 volunteers a year. On one recent National Rebuilding Day in Chicago's Englewood, roughly 1,500 volunteers repaired more than 60 homes.
Time: A day or a weekend Commitment: One-time Good for: All hands
9. Help throw a block party with a purpose A block party built around something useful, like a coat drive, a fundraiser for a neighbor, or a sign-up table for the next cleanup, always needs people to staff a table, run a grill, or keep the whole thing moving. A lot of these land around GivingTuesday, the global day of generosity the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, when towns run their own drives and fundraisers. Give a few hours, and you make the day for everyone who came to enjoy it.
Time: A day Commitment: One-time Good for: Going solo or with the family
10. Help bring back a public space Some jobs don't finish in a morning. Bringing back a park taken over by weeds, an abandoned community center, or a wall buried under graffiti takes a season of Saturdays before the change really shows. Sign on for the long haul, and you get to watch a place everyone had written off come all the way back.
Time: Ongoing over a season Commitment: Recurring Good for: The committed
