Three or Four Hours a Week, and Someone Gets to Go Home

May contain affiliate links; I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Everything here is my opinion. Full disclosures

No pitch here. Just a plain look at something you might want, or might not, with no hard feelings either way.

I am not going to try to talk you into volunteering. I have never been good at talking people into things, and the people I admire most were not talked into the good things they do either. They got a clear enough look at what was being asked, recognized themselves in it, and said yes.

I am a medical equipment advanced technician with the Canadian Red Cross, paid staff on the repair bench. But the program I work inside, the Health Equipment Loan Program, the one that lends out wheelchairs and walkers and hospital beds so people can recover at home after surgery or illness, runs on volunteers. If you have ever half-wondered whether you could do something like it, here is what it actually involves.

What the work actually is

The program needs three kinds of help, and only one of them goes anywhere near a wrench. There are technician volunteers, who clean and repair the equipment, which is the part I do. There are delivery volunteers, who get equipment to where it has to be. And there are client services volunteers, who answer the phone, match a person to the right equipment, walk them through using it, and keep the records straight so the next person gets what they need.

You do not need medical training. You do not need any prior experience at all. The Red Cross trains you for the role on purpose, because they would rather teach a willing person than screen for a credential. The time it asks for is modest and specific: generally three or four hours a week, a morning or an afternoon, mostly weekdays, with some evening and Saturday shifts where they are needed. You have to be sixteen.

The reasons people give for not

I know the reasons because I have used most of them myself, about one thing or another.

"I do not have the time." Almost no one does, in the sense of having it sitting around spare. But three or four hours a week barely dents an afternoon, and the schedule bends to fit your life instead of asking your life to bend to it.

"I do not have the skills." Client services needs a kind phone manner, some patience, and enough care to enter information correctly so the right chair reaches the right person. Delivery needs you to be reliable. The technician bench needs you to be willing to learn, and they teach you the rest. None of that is rare. You very likely already have it.

"I am afraid it will be heavy, or that I will be guilted into giving more." It is not, and you will not be. The work is calm, practical, and bounded. You do your shift, you do it well, you go home.

Who it is for, and who it is not

I will not pretend it is for everyone, because pretending that is how you end up with people quietly resenting their own kindness. If your life has no margin in it right now, none at all, then this is not your season, and that is not a failing. Look after your own first. There is no shame in it.

But if you have a few hours and a quiet sense that you would like some part of your week to land on someone other than yourself, this is one of the simplest ways I know to do exactly that. You will not fix the world in an afternoon. You will help one real person keep a little of their independence, and then another. It runs on the same instinct as the ballet I have produced for the Red Cross, only lighter and closer to home.

If it turns out to be a yes

The Health Equipment Loan Program is looking for volunteers all across British Columbia and Yukon, in the big cities and the small towns both, including the one I live in. You can read the role and apply directly, with no pressure from me or anyone else. If it is a yes, you will feel it, the same way I did. And if it becomes one of those commitments that stays with you when you are off the clock, you will have found something most people spend years looking for.