Spending Time In Service To Others

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 25, 2007

Anne Hugill has a sizable commute from her home in Fairfax County to a stressful accounting job at AOL in Dulles. And each week, she suits up in workout wear to teach boot-camp, step-aerobics and core-conditioning classes.

So you might think she would spend her free time with a bubble bath or a good book. Instead, Hugill passes much of it volunteering.

Two to four weekends a month, Hugill, 43, might be straightening library bookshelves, tagging thrift-store clothing or cleaning streams. And like other members of Volunteers for Change, a Fairfax program that organizes night and weekend volunteer gigs for working adults in the career-obsessed and traffic-jammed Washington area, Hugill insists that giving back feels more like a release than a drag.

"It takes your mind off your day things," Hugill, 43, said. "When you meet these people who need you and love to see you, it just brings everything back to a more even keel, and you just feel great about being there."

A national study found this year that residents of the Washington region volunteer at a rate higher than the national average, despite long commutes and busy lives.

Residents of suburban Washington generally devote about 60 hours per year to volunteering, compared with 50 hours nationally, according to the study by the Corporation for National and Community Service. That is good news for Volunteer Fairfax, an organization that connects people and corporations with volunteer jobs in the county through programs including Volunteers for Change and VolunteerFest, to be held Saturday.

Each year during the one-day, give-back extravaganza, hundreds of volunteers fan out across Fairfax to devote a few hours to helping schools, parks and nonprofit organizations.

This year, participants can choose from projects that include stuffing care packages for U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, pulling weeds at parks and rebuilding the Northern Virginia Therapeutic Riding Program's horse barn in Clifton, which was destroyed by fire in July. There are 44 projects, many suitable for families and children.

The hope is that first-timers will catch the volunteering bug.

"Volunteerism is alive and well," said Cori Bassett, a spokeswoman for Volunteer Fairfax. "But the need for volunteers in this area is ongoing. As much as a nonprofit gains and expands, it's more opportunity to serve more people, and there's more need for volunteers."

Hugill will spend VolunteerFest hanging and processing donated clothes at Yesterday's Rose in Fairfax, a thrift store that raises funds for organizations including the American Red Cross. Yesterday's Rose is one of her regular volunteer sites.

Three years ago, Hugill had done only a few volunteer jobs through her workplace. But once, after she began a tough project at work, she yearned for a distraction, something meaningful. She wanted to feel that she was giving, she said, not just getting.

That's when she found Volunteers for Change.

"Meeting new people and just seeing the needs in our county . . . took away the focus of being so busy all day long and the stress of being on a project," Hugill said. "The rewards were almost immediate."

Now she has done so many service jobs that she keeps them listed in a folder. She has cooked meals for families of hospital patients, planted trees and sold used wedding gowns to benefit breast cancer patients.

Hugill said she has seen the gratitude of those she has helped, such as the volunteer coordinator at a library, who greets her with a huge smile, and senior citizens at a retirement home, whose garden she used to help tend. She would spend the afternoon sharing lunch or watching the Kentucky Derby with them.

"It puts everything in perspective," Hugill said.

There are some jobs she will not take. She says no to pet adoption days, for example, "because I think I'd take them all home."

But Hugill has found others to do those jobs, including some of her boot-camp students, who were so intrigued by her absence one night that she brought Volunteers for Change pamphlets to show them where she had been.

"I want to be contagious about it but not pushy," she said.

So does one of the newest recruits to Volunteers for Change, Arlington County resident Al Narayanan. On a recent evening, he and a group of friends he had rallied sorted through a bounty of donated medical supplies at CrossLink International, a Falls Church agency that sends such supplies to troubled areas around the globe. They counted products, checked for expired medications and organized the material into labeled boxes.

Narayanan, 26, had volunteered here and there in the past, but recently he said he began feeling an urge to "give back" more regularly. He started looking for a program that would fit with his 60- to 70-hour weeks working in product services for a software company.

The Volunteers for Change projects were perfect, he said. They are close to his Tysons Corner job and short enough to squeeze in after work.

"Because I'm predominantly busy, I try to relax sometimes. But sometimes I feel like I could better use my time, instead of an extra hour in front of the television," Narayanan said. "I don't know. Maturity, I guess you could call it that."

Susan and George Hasuike of Herndon have been volunteering for so long they cannot quite remember when they started. These days, they regularly log onto the Volunteers for Change Web site to find projects that sound fun and are close to their home. There's always something, they said.

Susan Hasuike, 58, said she loves helping out on bingo night at a Sterling retirement home. They both like doing charity walks.

"We consider it like a hobby," said George Hasuike, 61, a network engineer for Sprint Nextel.

Their dog, which Susan Hasuike calls a "spoiled-rotten female" Labrador-beagle mix, prefers when the couple takes projects in parks, because then she gets to come.

"Volunteering gives me a break from my regular job," said Susan Hasuike, a part-time caretaker for a boy with cerebral palsy. "A job is tiring, and volunteering is tiring, but in a different way."