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If you’ve been feeling disconnected, lonely, and anxious, you’re not alone. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy (2023) warned of an epidemic of loneliness and isolation that can undermine our emotional and physical health, and the World Health Organization (2025) reported a worldwide rise in anxiety and depression.
As educator Kim Samuel has found, we need community, a sense of belonging, in order to feel safe and secure (2022). Throughout history, people have lived in small groups, as hunter-gatherers, then in small towns and communities. And the Harvard study of longevity (Waldinger & Schulz, 2023) has found that a sense of belonging enables us to live longer, healthier lives.
One way we can restore our sense of community is by volunteering, which can take many forms.
- When he left the White House, former President Jimmy Carter set a new example of leadership by volunteering to build houses for Habitat for Humanity. For over 30 years, he and former first lady Rosalynn Carter worked alongside other volunteers, building new affordable homes for people across the country and around the world. He founded the Carter Center, which has monitored elections, helped rid the developing world of diseases, and resolved conflicts internationally.
- Any one of us can make a difference. My friend Gertrude Welch worked for years as a secretary at Santa Clara University. When she retired, she said she’d “work full time for peace and justice.” And she did. Gertrude worked with local churches to create sanctuaries for Central American refugees, helped develop low-income housing in San Jose, California, and was involved in a movement to reduce hate in our community. In 2010, the San Jose Peace and Justice Center established the annual Gertrude Welch Peace and Justice Award in her honor.
- In an innovative approach combining volunteer work with music, Sarah Murray founded Concerted, a nonprofit that offers people a range of volunteer opportunities and enables them to exchange their volunteer hours for concert tickets.
Diana Long, who began volunteering with Concerted after retiring, says she’s enjoyed “the relationships I’ve built doing food rescue. I do one every Friday, and I’ve gotten to know the people quite well at the nonprofit where I take the food.” She also appreciates the opportunity to go to concerts, “making new friends, and a lot of times I’ll take tickets to a show of a musician I’m not familiar with, discovering something new and enjoying that as well” (personal communication, December 4, 2025).
Volunteering can bring us out of isolation and back into community. Since COVID, many of my neighbors still have items delivered instead of going to local stores, substituting convenience for community, which causes many local shops to close. We need to rebuild our sense of community.
In our highly polarized political environment, volunteering can help bring people together. As Sarah Murray says, “a country fan, a baseball fan, a heavy metal fan might have different ideologies, but if you get them in the same room together, volunteering, it allows for getting to know each other and, hopefully, fostering more tolerance” (personal communication, December 4, 2025).
In my own life, I felt a surge of joy this month when my neighbors and I collected food for our local food bank. This feeling of joy in volunteering has been called “helper’s high,” associated with better health and longevity (Dossey, 2018).
Other benefits of volunteer work include meaningful social engagement and a renewed sense of purpose, which can buffer against stress and promote greater mental and physical health. Studies have shown that reaching out in acts of kindness can reduce anxiety and depression as well as increase our well-being (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005). People who help others are 10 times more likely to be in good health (Luks, 2001), and recent studies have found that volunteering can slow the rate of aging in older adults (Kim et al., 2025).
What about you? Can you begin this new year by reaching out to volunteer for a cause that you believe in? Taking this one small step could lead to greater health and harmony within and around you.
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This post is for informational purposes and should not substitute for psychotherapy with a qualified professional. © 2026 Diane Dreher, All Rights Reserved.
