Looking for Family Volunteering Opportunities? Here’s One Your Whole Family Can Get Behind (From Home!)
I struggle with finding family volunteering opportunities. Plus, squeezing time to fit these important brain-building skills into our family schedule is hard! What do you do when you have both tiny humans and mid-sized humans and you want to show them what volunteering means, especially when opportunities for the whole family are scarce? Well, today’s podcast has a solution for you.
Meet Nicole Moll from Box of Balloons.
This amazing creative mom of three has a way for your entire family to give back from the convenience of your own home. (Say what!?) Her national non-profit, Box Of Balloons, has chapters all throughout the US and they need volunteers on the reg! And yes! This is a from-home volunteer opportunity!
They have a totally amazing mission, focus and fundamental goal your whole family (yes, even your kids) can rally behind.
Mission: To make each birthday happy and every child celebrated. Every child deserves to feel special, be celebrated and have a memorable party.
Focus: To ensure each child feels special and celebrated on their birthday. A child's birthday should be happy despite a family's current situation, living conditions, or financial status.
Fundamental Goal: To provide joy, hope and celebration for the child and their family.
After we got done recording this podcast I realized I want to do more for this organization. We have dabbled in helping but I want to make a bigger impact for Box Of Balloons. So here's what I'm going to do for everybody listening out there. I am going to put my money where my mouth is in talking on this podcast and supporting this great cause.
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Building Brains Through Family Volunteering
In this Episode of The Rooted Family Podcast...
I am so excited to share with you Nicole Moll. She is a wife, a mama, of three boys and a creative entrepreneur. She founded the non-profit Box Of Balloons. (00:38)
“I felt like there was something more that I needed to do to fill that creativity tank up. I also wanted something for my community. You know, I just felt like every day it was kind of the same hustle and bustle, the same schedule. And before I knew it, it was bedtime and I was like, man, what did I do for anyone else today?” (04:10)
Birthdays to kids and especially in our society today in the United States, they are such a big deal. And they're taught. They talk about them at school, so to not be able to either provide one for your kid because you're trying to make life work for you or to be that kid in the situation... (06:06)
Every birthday box has the same number of items and the same supplies, but the child or family can request a theme and they can request certain items. And so every single birthday box is very unique and especially the volunteers that get involved.(09:10)
We really want to be behind the scenes. We want to be a no strings attached organization and we want the kids to feel and to see this party coming from their parents or caregivers, not from stranger volunteers. (09:26)
But I also think about all the people that put the box together and go through that process, how that actually builds their brains as well. And it builds that empathy factor. It builds all those neural transmitters that get released - that serotonin. So really that mental health component you guys slide in across the board from the moment it comes to the social worker. (11:02)
You can volunteer as a family. You can do it as much or as little as you can do. And you're helping your kids give back, grow their gratitude, grow their kindness, grow their empathy skills while helping somebody else. (12:53)
If you have a local chapter near you, you can join their volunteer team. We need about seven people per birthday box to help make that happen. It's all volunteers. You can join your local team and it's really flexible. (19:54)
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This Episode's Question:
What do you and your family do together to boost brains and give back?
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