I tried my own zip code and came up with a list of clearly described jobs, with links to the organizations, contact info, all marked up on Google Maps.

I'd like to invite everyone who's part of BlogHer to sign in on serve.gov and create a profile. Take a look at the service opportunities in your town. You can vote "like" on ones that appeal to you, and easily send them in email to friends, or post them as Facebook, Twitter or Bebo updates. Summer of Service seems to be an invitation to treat this summer as a time to focus on volunteer work, service work, and community. It's a big push for people to try it out and to get involved. Students can earn education credit through the program. Britt Bravo on Have Fun Do Good describes the program and the First Lady's speech, here: First Lady Michelle Obama and United We Serve.

People were *so* excited in the convention center. The middle of the room was full of Americorps and Hands On folks, lots of them very young, all with noise making swag passed out at the door and in the security line. So it had the mood of a sports fan crowd, with music, drummers, the Glide Choir singing, and everyone cheering! People were especially psyched up to see Michelle Obama.

While I waited in the "media" security line to have my laptop examined by the Secret Service (they enjoyed my stickers!) I chatted with Nancy Coyote from the US Forest Service. She coordinates youth volunteers for the Forest Service in Oregon, Region 6. She was in line with me not because she was "media" but because she was a fellow wheelchair user. I admired her crutch holder attachment to the back of her chair, which she and her husband made from metal and duct tape! Nancy told me that around 10,000 people volunteer for the Forest Service in Oregon and Washington every year. High school and college students often call her looking for community service projects, and might do independent work or join a crew of workers, doing scientific research, hard physical labor, streamside repair, clerical work, or whatever the rangers and other workers do--except firefighting! You can see some of the jobs in the Region 6 Forest Service here. I think "grooming with the rock rake" looks exciting, because I'd love to drive one of those cute little ATVs.

In return I showed Nancy a blog I mentioned a few weeks ago on BlogHer.com: Fab Grandma, who writes about living in an RV and doing volunteer work at the Grand Canyon! I'm very interested in how people decide to change their lives in this way. It's a major life change that I imagine a lot of people dream of doing, but it's hard to picture the practical steps to take.

Personally, I'm fired up and enthusiastic about the idea of civic duty. I think that the Obama administration is on the right track, trying to effect a cultural shift that honors service work as being for the good of society and everyone. It is for all our good; it isn't something that wealthy people do to help helpless people out of "charity". We should never work from the "charity model" of thinking, because that's patronizing and damaging to the fabric of society and preserves existing power relationships.

However, there are also some pitfalls that I feel lurking in the idea that we all must pitch in, namely that it may still not be everyone pitching in. As women in particular, we have likely already done quite a lot of work for free. It is a point I am sensitive on also as a person with disabilities, since I'm often asked to volunteer to help professionals learn about Disability 101. I feel that many women of color also are expected to "serve" a bit more than others, to educate community organizers about diversity, and so on. As we struggle to incorporate everyone in a structure of volunteerism, we have to have safeguards against exploiting people's labor and disempowering them or making them downwardly mobile. I feel there has to be some practical balance between working for everyone's good, and working to get women's labor paid and valued. In short, it will be very important to make sure that the service work actually does result in being honored and leading to empowerment and independence. I have seen too many programs purport to be doing something noble in giving people with disabilities "opportunities" under the aegis of service work, and yet on some level what's happening is some corporation is getting a lot of very cheap labor and doesn't have to pay minimum wage, while the "opportunities" never turn into real jobs or independent lives for the people doing the work. Who is profiting from the free or cheap labor, and how much richer are they becoming off my conscientious labor? I'm not trying to be a wet blanket, but I think these are considerations good to keep in mind! We have to point out the pitfalls, in order to avoid them.

So, with that caveat, let's look to see what BlogHers are writing about volunteer and service work!

Mommy Muse blog has a two part guest post by Erin Rochelle, on keeping your sanity as a volunteer: Volunteering without losing your sanity and volunteering without losing your sanity, part II. Erin emphasizes being very clear about your boundaries and limits. Her advice aims in particular at moms who volunteer for their children's schools. What do you do when you join the PTA and no one else *does their job*? Erin has great answers.

Type A Mom recommends that people Take a Volunteer Vacation. Instead of going on an expensive vacation to vary your routine and your life, go somewhere and do a week of volunteer work.

What's Cooking blog has many posts about food and service projects! She's inspiring! Cook for pets, feed hungry kids; Kids, Food, and Community Service: Call for Ideas; and The Great American Bake Sale to end child hunger. Her blog tagline is "Cooking with Kids for a better body, planet, and community and it looks like she puts her kids where her keyboard is! That is, in her kitchen.

My favorite posts were by Renee from Cutie Booty Cakes. She's hilarious and always makes me think. First of all, she gets instant coolness cred for having done AmeriCorp work in public schools in Atlanta. Renee tells the story of how volunteer work led her to unexpected happiness. Later on, as a stay at home mom, she felt like she needed direction and passion. She did some volunteer work. This led her to start her own business online. Then, she started blogging, and wow!

    I finally realize why I feel the need to post on a daily basis. As I sat here contemplating "to post or not to post" a tiny light bulb went off in my head. Oprah calls this an "a-ha" moment and it certainly is. My conclusion--I love community.

But earlier this year I realized there has to be more to life and decided to get fired up about something. So I decided to volunteer. I became the Captain of my Community Watch and offered to do more work with Mocha Moms--glowing embers but no fire. And then the idea of starting my business took off. My enthusiasm was evident--from idea to creation of website took me all of two weeks. And then I added blogging to the mix. Fire! A four alarm blaze is burning now.

Blogging has changed my life in ways I never could have predicted. The sense of community is beyond anything I have ever experienced in my life. I opened a fortune cookie that said "You are welcome at any gathering" and I thought how true. I am quite gregarious. But the thing about blogging is that we all are welcome at every gathering. Our blogs are an entryway into each others lives, political views, religious believes, fascinations, child-rearing, you name it and it is out there. We are welcome.

Her blogging itself is a kind of community service. She didn't know what to do. The thread of volunteering led her to starting a business, then to blogging and finding a huge, warm community. You, as her fellow bloggers, might be part of that community. I think being welcoming in that way in a public space is absolutely priceless.

I thought a bit of my teaching of blogging and Internet classes at my local library. I'd love to do that someday for high school kids or in assisted living centers. When I did relief work after Hurricane Katrina, my ability to blog and to help people use computers, doing online communication and tech support, meant that people who had lost everything gained access to vital information and also got their voices widely heard. As I watched the teenagers with email addresses and MySpace profiles get their entire extended families in contact, at a time when none of the adults had working phones, I realized that getting people online was a potential escape route from all sorts of bad situations. I'd like to roam the streets with my laptop, as a sort of mobile information booth, or help to create great public use computer stations that are accessible 24/7 in unlikely locations, not just in libraries and schools in rooms that are locked for most of the hours of the day. Now, none of that sounds like feeding the hungry or building someone a house. But I still believe that, as bloggers and even as blog readers or *heavy users of the Internet*, we have some potential there. As a blogger, you could go to an organization or a non profit in your town, and teach its staff about blogs and social media. Or just become their blogger, Twitterer, and Facebook-status updater. I think that would be a great way for BlogHers to serve!

The last speaker of the conference was Maria Shriver. I didn't expect to like her so much, but I thought everything she said was smart and right on. She talked about Kiva and microloans, her efforts to create the California Volunteers web site, and how she'd like every state, not just California and New York, to have cabinet-level officials whose focus is on service and volunteering. Though I figure she has said it thousands of times in her life, I felt moved by her explanation that every day, a new person would come up to her to tell her how their life was changed by a program that one of her parents or friends or relatives had started; and that she had to live up to that, and we all should too, as a good legacy to leave behind us.

I'd like to leave you with these questions:

What's your dream of community service?

How, as a blogger, can you start doing community service to support a cause, a community, or an organization you love?

Submitted by Liz Henry (view blog)