Mom Chat: How do you get involved in your community?
How do you get involved in your community?
Inspired by a very volunteer-heavy week, how do you get involved in your local community? Do you give time, money, or both? Are there barriers to getting involved as a working mom?
We moved in December 2020, a tough time to build community, but we’ve been working hard to get involved and I’m enjoying a bit more time at home.
My husband is our PTA tribute, but I’m always up for a bit of manual labour or work on my pet projects (road safety for cyclists and pedestrians).
The last few weeks were abnormal in volume - a morning helping at a local eco festival, managing the active travel survey to help improve safety for kids scooting/cycling/walking to school (encouragingly about 65% of our community reported active travel most days), helping out with the PTA uniform sale/swap, and setting up the tea tent to raise money for the school.
How do you get involved in your local community? Do you give time, money, or both? Are there barriers to getting involved as a working mom?
And a reflection on a pre-scheduled post.
I find the gendered dimension of volunteering so interesting. My son's school is BIG and it's the same group of 10-12 mums at everything - school related and not. Most with already busy lives in terms of kids, work, other projects.
I said I did time, but I really do both time and money, it’s just aggressively skewed towards time right now. I started getting more heavily invested earlier in the pandemic, when I had dialed way back on work. I picked up our non-profit daycare board seat that my husband was vacating, then my eldest started elementary school and I started volunteering. I’m not naturally a joiner, but I have found myself over-committed at this point, now that I’ve been back to work for quite a while. I’m on two childcare organizations boards, I do a weekly school volunteer commitment, I was room parent this past year (never again!), and I try to show up for classroom volunteering semi-regularly (esp library!). I was considering adding something recently but I really don’t have any extra time. At this point, I need to start stepping back from things, but it’s hard. I really like being involved and it makes me feel so much more connected and aware of our community. Our kid balance is about to shift from two in daycare/1 in elementary to 1 in daycare/2 in elementary and I’d like my volunteer time to reflect that. I also really hate the gendered component SO much. Interestingly, our daycare board is pretty balanced (and sometimes skews more male), but at elementary school it is predominantly women providing the insane unpaid labor the public schools in our town apparently run on. At the same time, my kids benefit from a lot of that unpaid labor, so I do feel the need to contribute as I can.