Achieving Greater Social Inclusion Through Volunteering

Volunteering is generally thought of as a mechanism in which people choose to assist others.  Recent work, however, has indicated that volunteering possesses a number of ancillary attributes in respect to positively affecting those who volunteer.  Volunteering, for example, has been shown to contribute to the overall physical and psychological health of those who volunteer.  In this Along the Web we’ll examine another positive aspect of volunteering – its ability to assist those who have been excluded from the social, economic and political mainstream. And we’ll focus on resources for assisting those of you who wish to broaden and diversify your volunteer base.

This is a somewhat eclectic and arbitrary selection and we’ve chosen to simply group the results into rough categories, many of which overlap:  persons with mental illness; persons with disabilities; immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers; low-income and unemployed people; minorities and ethnic communities; homeless persons;  Aboriginal and Native communities.