Community & Connection
What’s In It For Me? The Benefits of Volunteering By Andrés Alvarez
T
here’s a Spanish saying I find funny: “Pagas para que te alquilen,” or “You pay to get rented out.” It’s used to describe people who love to help others; people whose happiness is tied to giving a hand, or volunteering. I’m sure we all know someone like that. Maybe you are that person. What’s interesting is that the phrase uses “pay” as a way to show how far some people will go to help. Most definitions of volunteering focus on it being unpaid work that helps someone else. Often, it’s seen as something only people with lots of time and money do for those with less. But does that really match what most of us see? Is it only people with extra resources who help out? And if there’s no money involved, is it true that only the recipient benalbertaseniorliving.ca
efits? Maybe there’s another kind of reward; something you don’t see on a bank statement, but that keeps people coming back. Or maybe this idea of transactions is missing the bigger picture about community and getting involved. In 2025, Volunteer Alberta teamed up with the social design agency InWithForward to do some research. We had seen numbers telling us that volunteering had dropped a lot after COVID-19, which many saw as a crisis. However, we wanted to know the story behind those numbers. We did not know if people were not wanting to help anymore, or if this help wasn’t being considered as volunteerism, or at least in the way we were defining it. This made us think differently about what volunteering means. Instead of seeing it only as a way to help others,
we started to view volunteering as a way to meet basic human needs, like security, purpose, self-worth, and connection. In this light, volunteering is not just good for communities but also good for the volunteer. With this in mind, I’d like to share some key findings and ideas with you. Most of us have volunteered at some point; maybe for a school project, or by helping out through family activities, like watching a parent coach a sports team. In our research, people often shared positive memories of their volunteering, even if they weren’t volunteering at the time we met them. This was especially true for Albertans aged 55 and up. For many, retiring isn’t just about slowing down; it’s a chance to find new ways to stay connected and valued. We met people like Dennis, who calls his volunteering a “personal
Alberta Senior living A lifestyle Magazine for Albertans 55+ • March/April 2026 37