Take the challenge
“You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.”*
Spend those minutes and hours wisely. Take the 75 Hour Challenge.
United Way is issuing a challenge to the people in the greater St. Louis region: volunteer 75 hours of time between now and National Volunteer Week 2009 (the end of April). Why? To help promote volunteering in the region and to celebrate the 75th anniversary of United Way’s Volunteer Center — started in 1933 — one of the oldest in the nation.
People can sign up to take part in the challenge at any time by visiting www.stl.unitedway.org/75hourchallenge.aspx.
GenNext is known for its emphasis on volunteering. Regular GenNext projects count toward the challenge, as do smaller projects you do on your own. If you need ideas, United Way has a list of more than 125 ways to give back and help build a healthier, stronger community.
If you sign up soon, it will take less than two hours of volunteering each week to complete the challenge. Once signed up, you’ll receive tips and reminders and have the opportunity to interact on United Way’s Web site.
“The list of ideas we have contains really creative ways to make a difference, from the current need of sandbagging to baking a batch of cookies and delivering them to an area senior center,” said Rick Skinner, vice president of the Volunteer Center. “We have great volunteers in this community, and they do great work. Volunteers are important to this region and necessary to so many organizations.”
*A Live United t-shirt will go to the first person to correctly identify that quote by posting a comment below.