
Ask HN: Do you do volunteer work? - yonatanoy
Hi HN,<p>I&#x27;m a college student interested in spending some time doing weekly volunteer work. 
What&#x27;s your advice on some ways I can do that? 
Does anyone volunteer regularly who wouldn&#x27;t mind sharing their experience?
Additionally, what are some ways to use a math &#x2F; CS skill-set to impact my community in a positive way?
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kusha
I volunteer my time at my local FIRST high school robotics team. There are a
lot of teams looking for mentors.
[https://chiefdelphi.com](https://chiefdelphi.com) can be a good resource to
find a team.

I find it extremely fulfilling teaching programming and controls to students.
It's helped me grow professionally too.

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hn17
I understand your volunteer work goal may be to "use a math / CS skill-set to
impact my community in a positive way". There are many ways you can use your
skills. For example, you could start participating in a well established and
valuable open-source project or take a part in hackathons solving big
problems, you could organize workshops, teach people. Anything you do,
remember to balance your volunteer work with other parts of life and career.

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muzani
I teach programming to kids, former Uber drivers, entrepreneurs, etc. Also
training the people who teach programming.

I'm not sure if it counts as volunteering as they pay well, but it's still way
below market rate and I only do it for the social impact. But it's been less
impactful than expected - only one person has ever changed their life from it,
which is why I stopped.

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tstegart
I volunteer at the humane society in my county and its a ton of fun. The staff
are caring and sweet, the other volunteers are amazing, and its fun seeing all
the animals getting cared for. Surprisingly, its happy and sad to see them
adopted. You are glad they have found a home, but you kind of miss them.

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neuroticfish
>Additionally, what are some ways to use a math / CS skill-set to impact my
community in a positive way?

You could volunteer at a code camp for underprivileged kids, or maybe tutor
math for free for people who cannot afford it.

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tmaly
I volunteered to teach two lessons on programming to two elementary classes
for coding week this year. I have never done this before.

But if you have CS skills I think you could do the same. Just visit a local
school.

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jamil7
I volunteer on two open source not for profit projects, they're both legacy
projects which would require huge amounts of work to completely modernise.

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tapiok
Openstreetmap has lot's of work and challenges for (also) tech types. If you
like maps :-)

