The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Can anyone explain to me what's happening exactly?
I decided I'm at the point in life when I can/should start "giving back". Of course, giving money is one way. But I thought I could volunteer my autist ML and Data skills too, I'm pretty sure charities all over need some numbers crunched and visualizations made. I decided to do this because me (and people with similar skills) are going to be too expensive for most charities and what I can offer will be thus relatively high leverage.
Not a single local or global charity got back to me. What gives? Do they not need numbers crunched and visualizations made? Or they just don't have the bandwidth? Or am I overestimating how much I can actually help or how much of my help is required?
As someone who works in the non-profit world, they just don't feel like they can rely on volunteers for anything more important than door-knocking campaigns. Most volunteers are incompetent, flaky, or both. Which is fine if all you're looking for are warm bodies to stand on the street corner getting people to sign a petition or something, but serious number-crunching work is not something most charities will be willing to risk on some rando. They've been burned too many times relying on whackjob retirees and volunteers who suddenly get busy and ghost halfway through projects, leaving the full-timers to work long hours cleaning up the mess.
You'll probably have more luck the smaller and more local you go. All-volunteer community organizations are going to be far more grateful for (and much more in need of) your assistance than big national-level non-profits. Or perhaps start volunteering somewhere in a more menial capacity so they can get to know you, then offering to provide more high-skilled work once some trust has been built up.
I could be mistaken, but I also have a vague memory of a website thats like a non-profit version of Fiverr where organizations who are actively looking for freelance help can go and solicit for volunteers.
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