Giving Compass' Take:

• This article from Entrepreneur discusses how volunteering can boost your leadership experience and help change lives.

• One study cited shows that weekly volunteering leads to happiness levels comparable to a life-changing salary boost. What does your giving time plan look like?

• Here's where to volunteer for the holiday season — and for the rest of the year, too.


Volunteers often work on a team — whether building houses or sitting on a board — and the planning process allows you opportunities to develop and hone your leadership skills. As McGill University faculty member Karl Moore wrote in Forbes: “Because corporate managers volunteering in nonprofits don’t have titles to define their positions, they have to practice what some call 'per mission leadership.'

"That is, they have to earn the trust and respect of the people they are supervising. Also, they need to do all this with what are usually much more limited resources than what they are accustomed to in their ‘real jobs,' which often requires significant creative skills.”

A recent study by Deloitte supported these points: 85 percent of the study's respondents agreed that skills-based volunteering had helped them advance their communication skills versus 77 percent saying this about non-skills-based volunteering. When you're presented with a challenge in a non-professional environment, you may have an opportunity to show off what you can do ...

When you volunteer, you are often exposed to not only an entirely new group of like-minded people, but also often a group of individuals you wouldn’t cross paths with otherwise. While this is a good tool from a professional development standpoint, it can be critically important if you’re looking for a new job.

Read the full article about how philanthropic involvement can advance your career by Rhoden Monrose at Entrepreneur.