By Donna Westfall – April 25, 2024
Bet you didn’t know that April salutes volunteers. It was 1974 when President Richard Nixon established National Volunteer Week to recognize the thousands and thousands of volunteers that support causes they care about.
Recently in the news is our volunteer fire department, community clean-ups, donating blood, help in the animal shelters and food pantry’s.
Volunteering is not done for financial gain. It could be for fun as helping with a school play or project. It could be for fundraising to help with an event. Right now the local Chamber of Commerce is seeking volunteers to be in the office assisting visitors.
It was in 1991 that President George H. W. Bush established April as National Volunteer Month.
I remember volunteering to help stuff envelopes for John F. Kennedy’s campaign for President. I was in junior high school. It’s never too young to learn to help out with something you feel passionate about it.
Coming up is several tax repeals: Measure R and Measure S the County and City 1% sales tax. To get those on the ballot, about 900 signatures will have to be secured on the County measure and about 100 signatures on the City measure. In addition, there’s the Recall on Governor Newsom which will require millions of signatures. Plus the City will probably try to raise sewer rates to ratepayers while neglecting to raise sewer connection fees to developers and there’s plenty of development going on in our community.
Collecting signatures is a fantastic volunteer project. Sam Strait, author of hundreds of columns, spent 11 days in 2022 collecting over 750 signatures in front of WalMart to get the repeal of Measure R on the ballot and it did go on the ballot. However, that was voted down and the sales tax remains to this day.
But the great thing about voting is that we can still put initiatives out there. Do you recall it took two tries at the ballot box to get the poison fluoride out of our drinking water. That effort was also volunteer driven.
When you see a need that connects with your interests; volunteer.
