Thanks to Danielle Selber for sharing her thoughts about her experiences volunteering with Birthright Israel NEXT’s Harvest to Harvest campaign!

I love to cook. If you’re looking for me, you can usually find me in the kitchen, stirring away at homemade tomato sauce or a big pot of soup, adding ingredients that don’t quite match just for the thrill of it. I often serve Shabbat dinner for twenty, and I really like chopping all those onions. I bake cookies for my Hebrew school students regularly (to the chagrin of their parents), and my boss has nicknamed me “Kugels Lebowski” for my uncanny ability to make a festive kugel for any random occasion. For my last birthday, I received six cookbooks.

On a list of the great loves of my life, volunteering comes in a close second after cooking. For me, volunteering is a uniquely meaningful and uplifting undertaking. I truly enjoy it; I squeeze in every hour I can, whenever I can spare it. In the big picture, I see volunteering as a way to elevate the acts of ordinary individuals to something beautiful and deeply valuable, and to create social consciousness on an active, engaged level.

Volunteering can also be, I’m sorry to say, an overwhelming, frustrating, logistical nightmare. Try typing “volunteering opportunities” plus your city name into Google. I get 1,690,000 hits for my home city of Philadelphia. As a citizen of the world, that’s a heartwarming statistic – it’s wonderful to realize that there are so many local ways to give back. But when I first started as a Fellow for Birthright Israel NEXT in Philadelphia, my excitement for creating service opportunities in my community was quickly quashed by the sheer force of these numbers. How do you weed out the legitimate organizations from the rest, the meaningful opportunities from the mundane? Where do I begin?

So, I thought, start with what you love. I remembered an email I had received from the Birthright Israel NEXT national team, in which they introduced Harvest to Harvest, a program that supports volunteering and community involvement. It also includes a website that allows anyone to access local volunteering opportunities by zip code and keyword. I typed in my zip code and, to narrow down my search, I entered the keyword “hunger.” I figured that, since food and cooking are passions of mine, I could parlay those interests into creating an event that was meaningful to me, and that my community would respond to my excitement and enjoy the experience, too.

Utilizing Harvest to Harvest was so easy that the very first event on which I clicked ended up being the first local volunteering event I organized in Philly Utilizing Harvest to Harvest was so easy for me and I instantly found many opportunities in my hometown. As I got more involved, I decided to organize my own volunteering events through Birthright Israel NEXT Philadelphia. And, on Thanksgiving Day last year, we packed and served lunches for homeless Philadelphians. From there our volunteering calendar filled up and the enthusiasm for local events took off; since then we’ve volunteered to cook and serve a hot lunch for residents of a local shelter, paint an inner city school, and clean up a community center. In a month, we’re having a cupcake-making party to fundraise for Celiac disease research, and right before Passover we’ll be running a chametz can drive to benefit a local food pantry.

Figuring out what my passions are was always simple; it was translating that love into action that was always so hard. Thanks to a great resource, an energized community, and a little bit of creative thinking, that too became as easy as pie!