Volunteer at a local event or festival

“There were colorful paints and glitters on the table, and I knew it would be perfect even though I’ve never had any experience with it before. Before starting the festival, I told the members I wanted to help out with face painting. There was a professional face painter at the booth, and I had about 30 minutes to learn from her. I convinced myself I can just practice the easy ones for now, but it turned out that everyone wanted a unique design of their own. Once the festival started, lots of families and kids came straight to the face painting booth. The first challenge came when the first customer said he wanted to be a tiger. For a tiger, I needed to paint his whole face yellow and add the mustache. I was a bit worried, but I picked out the yellow paint and started on his face. The boy looked nervous because the paint was cold and the brush tickled his face. During the process, I had no idea how it would turn out, but I didn’t want to disappoint him by looking hesitant. Finally, I was confident enough to finish it off with black spots on his forehead, and I told him to open his eyes. The moment I held up a mirror to let him take a look, he gave me a big smile and said, “Thank you!” I was so surprised that he liked my painting. Then he ran to his father to showhim the painting. It made me so happy that my drawing could bring so much joy to them.”

“Volunteering for Hula was one of the best festival experiences of my life. My partner and I got a fantastic posting and really felt bad for how little “work” we had to do. We knew other volunteers who had to do shit like wash dishes for 8 hours or dig trenches in Spirit Lake at 2am, so the work can definitely vary. That said, from what I heard about what vols have to do at Bonnaroo (like clean the showers?!), it’s much lighter work overall, and is not balls hot. We did two daytime shifts (Friday and Saturday) and got post-show cleanup for our third. Post-show was pretty grueling, but we scored incredible discarded camping gear and got to spend the whole day with the friends we’d made on our crew. If you’re lucky enough to get pre- or post-show shifts, your required hour commitment will be much longer than someone who only works during the actual festival, but it’s a fair trade off. The hour commitment varied from 18 to 25 hours total across three shifts, depending on the times/types of shifts you got.”