15 Ways To Give Back To Your Hometown

Posted by: KHTS Articles in News Articles November 13, 2019 - 2:46 pm 0 1,430 Views

The place where you were raised has a huge impact on who you become as an adult. As such, it’s understandable that you’d feel some sense of attachment to that place later in life, even after you’ve already achieved a level of success that gives you the option of relocating. Many people wind up staying in their hometown for most of their lives due to this sentimental attachment. However, simply sticking around because you love a place isn’t really showing that you love it.

To really show some love to your community and give back some of the nurturing that it gave it you in your younger years, you might be ready to put in some positive philanthropic or career efforts. For starters, here are 15 ways you can starting creating a memorable local legacy through good deeds and work well done in your hometown:

1. Become a Local Social Worker

Whether you need the money or not, the fulfillment that can come with becoming a local social worker is enough to make it an appealing career option for anyone who is looking for something positive to do for their community. You can help families and kids conquer problems related to abuse, drug addiction, learning disabilities, and other common societal problems. You can advance you career later on to earn more money and have more influence by earning master’s degree in social work (MSW). You can even find programs that will let you earn an MSW online, no GRE required.

2. Set Up a Charity and Collect Donations for a Local Cause

Setting up a local charity is one of the most obvious and effective ways to start helping members of your community meet their needs and cover expenses that would normally create an additional burden over their ongoing monthly expenses. You could start a local collection jar for a specific cause. Or, you could take your cause to the world by creating a page on a crowdfunding site in order to either raise funds for community projects or to help out individual residents or families who are struggling with personal problems such as a need for housing, transportation, or medical care.

3. Organize Holiday Food Drives

The holidays can be a particularly stressful time for families in terms of gathering all of the money needed to have an extravagant and enjoyable holiday season without struggling to pay bills in the process. Organizing a holiday food drive will let you take responsibility for alleviating some of the burden that comes with spending hundreds on food between the feast that come with holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. This can be an easy kind of fundraising effort to set up because people are usually more than willing to contribute to such a cause.

4. Carry Out Community Cleanup Projects

If you’ve noticed that there are parts of your community that could use some cleanup, getting a team of people together and taking care of it over the course of a weekend is something you can do to invoke positive change in the short-term. You could invest in some tools and find a few volunteers to put together a veritable cleaning powerhouse, scouring the roadsides and parking lots for any small bits of trash or debris that might be creating small but noticeable eyesores in your town. Everyone wants a cleaner place to live and work, so you’ll be doing a good deed and a societal service for the members of your community. Carrying out projects like these and not asking for any reward can be the most fulfilling kind of work, and you don’t need to commit to any long-term career aspirations either.

5. Hold Competitions and Contests

You might be wondering how holding a competition or contest would be giving back to your community. Well, you could offer prize money, or at the bare minimum, the contestants and competitors would know that they’d be receiving local recognition by participating in the event. There are so many different kinds of artforms and talents that people can showcase, so it gives everyone an opportunity see what some of the local kids and upcoming visual or musical artists can do. Thus, it’s also a great source of entertainment that a festival or fair could easily revolve around.

6. Start a Business

Starting a company that’s based in your hometown helps you contribute to the local economy because you’ll be paying all of the licensing fees and local taxes that come with operating a brick-and-mortar business. Many entrepreneurs decide to incorporate their companies in other jurisdictions to obtain financial rewards, but choosing to incorporate in your hometown is an honorable way to show loyalty to the local economy. You can also use your authority as a business owner to organize and fund local projects for general community maintenance, restoration, and upkeep. Starting with a location in your hometown is also smart because it gives your friends and family the chance to help you generate the initial wave of sales.

7. Sponsor Events

If you already have a business, or you’re just looking for an admirable way to invest a lump sum of money, you could sponsor an upcoming event in your hometown. This could wind up being a mutually beneficial arrangement because the event would be receiving additional funding to make it a more memorable experience, while you’d be receiving recognition and credit as a business or individual in your area. Basically, the event gets what it wants from you (more funding), and you get what you want from the event (the popularity and exposure that the event sponsorship will provide).

8. Build or Provide Housing

Getting involved in the local real estate game can help you contribute to the local housing market in way that increases property values and provides better housing for members of your community. If you already own a property, you could look into sectioning it out and renting out smaller rooms or efficiencies on a weekly basis. Many people are in need of affordable short-stay accommodations, so this is another way to profit while also helping people who have an immediate need for affordable housing. Likewise, as a real estate investor or developer, you could take part in charitable building projects and initiatives such as Habitat for Humanity. As a property owner, there are so many ways you can help your hometown, not just by paying into local system and providing housing but also by leveraging your real estate reputation and network to organize all sorts of positive initiatives with other affluent and like-minded people in your area.

9. Become a Teacher or Coach

Becoming a local teacher or coach gives you the chance to interact with and influence the next generation of minds who will shape the future of your hometown and the world as a whole. These are also fairly easy jobs that come with relatively stable and steady schedules and salaries. There’s currently a shortage of qualified teachers in the U.S., so if you have a high school diploma or GED, you could become an elementary or middle school teacher very quickly. Likewise, if you have any expertise in personal fitness, you could leverage that to be hired as a P.E. coach or physical therapist.

10. Volunteer for Something

Regardless of where you live, there’s a good chance that you could probably find something to volunteer for right now if you really wanted to. Instead of thinking to yourself “what would I volunteer for,” get out there and start talking to people about work that needs to be done. You can also try searching through classified ad sites for volunteer opportunities. In a worst-case scenario, you can almost always find someone who needs some local help by posting your own ad on a classified site offering general volunteer services.

11. Provide Low-Cost Promotional Services to Local Businesses

Becoming a marketer is usually a self-motivated decision because it can be a very lucrative business if done right. However, offering your marketing service to businesses in your hometown at a steeply discounted rate will help you find additional clients while also giving local businesses a somewhat unfair advantage over online clients. Some marketers even get their start by offering complementary promotional services to local companies, as this can be a quick and easy way to build up a solid portfolio. Since marketing often stands at the core of any company’s success, you’ll also be offering a service that gives local entrepreneurs the competitive edge they need to start expanding their businesses. Plus, there’s also a home team sort of feel that comes with working with a team of local marketers, so any businesses will prefer your services over large online marketing firms.

12. Become a Local Politician

Being a local politician might not seem like the most appealing course of action in terms of having fun, but somebody has to be responsible and motivated enough to play these roles within society. As a local politician, you’ll be able to combat some of the systematic corruption than hinders growth and progress in many small towns and big cities. Since politics has a longstanding reputation of being a corrupt industry, it’s important for morally sound people to start getting into this field to offset the burden that greedy and self-centered politicians create.

13. Adopt a Brick or Adopt a Highway

Adopting a brick or adopting a highway sounds absurd if you don’t know what it means, but you’re essentially just sponsoring the construction of official buildings and roads through donations. In the case of the Adopt-a-Highway Program, you can even have a sign posted on the side of a major highway that highlights your business name or your own name. You can contact your local chamber of commerce or city hall to inquire about the options available for sponsoring projects in your area, as the procedures and processes involved in this kind of philanthropy will vary depending on local legislation.

14. Organize Holiday Gift Drives

Similar to a food drive, a gift drive is an excellent for of charity to facilitate during the holiday season because it can literally make or break the Christmas spirit for many families. If it weren’t for regional toy and gift drives during the holiday season, millions of kids would receive few or no gifts. This is another kind of community support project that is easy to get going because most people want to contribute to a cause that will help kids have a better holiday season. This also creates an opportunity for local businesses to contribute donations in exchange for receiving tax deductions equal to the value of their contributions, so it benefits local families and entrepreneurs simultaneously.

15. Commit Random Acts of Kindness

Finally, if none of the above sounds interesting, or you just don’t see yourself making any long-term or challenging commitments, you could just take a more relaxed approach to helping people in your community through random acts of kindness. This kind of approach works great if you have a decent amount of money to give away but you would prefer to see exactly who the money is helping and how. You can drive around in many areas and find no shortage of people who desperately need extra funds, many of whom may be homeless, unemployed, or disabled. By finding those individuals who are in need and spontaneously giving them an unexpected leg up, you’ll be helping to solve some of your community’s most pressing yet overlooked concerns.

Keeping Your Community a Place Where Youth Can Thrive

Ultimately, all of the actions above help you give back to your community not just financially, but also in other ways that make it a more conducive environment for educational, moral, and financial progress. By taking these steps in a strategic manner and following through on your long-term goals, you can have a lasting impact on the current and next generation of decision-makers in your area. If you think about it, that’s exactly what your parents and grandparents did to make it the place that you enjoyed so much as a child.