Volunteering During Pandemic Quotes

The year was 1967. The nation lived with this constant low-level anxiety about nuclear war. Some researchers had decided to study how people would actually respond during a nuclear attack. Right there in downtown Chicago, they’d built a nuclear fallout shelter and asked for volunteers. For some reason Carter’s mother had thought it a good idea to raise her hand, and so without Carter’s fully understanding why, he and his parents and his five siblings were taken to the shelter. “There’s barely enough room for four hundred people,” he recalled. “There’s concrete floors with no pillows or blankets. To eat, you had crackers, plus water that tasted like bleach. There’s one light that’s powered by a bike, so someone has to ride the bike to keep the light on. But the bike also can power a fan, so you had to choose between the light and the fan. It’s hot as hell.” The only creature comfort allowed was cigarettes. So the whole place filled with smoke. There Carter and his family remained for three days. The researchers stepped around them, taking notes. “They wanted to watch how people would behave,” said Carter. “So I got to watch, too.” What he realized, as he watched, was that there was no way a nuclear war would be anything like that. “My mom would be at home, and we’d be at school, and my dad would be at work,” he said. “We’d all be separated. We wouldn’t know how to get to the shelter, and that’s not where we’d go anyway.” His mind unspooled a different scenario that left him with a conviction that nuclear fallout shelters were probably a dumb idea. “Going through that experience forever changed my vision of these events.

During the coronavirus pandemic, billions of people responded to a highly unfamiliar, ever-changing threat with breathtaking cooperation and selflessness. Citizens around the world began staying home days before official stay-at-home orders were issued by their governments. This happened in poor countries and rich. After the U.K.’s National Health Service put out a call asking for 250,000 volunteers to run errands for at-risk people in quarantine, three times that many signed up. There were exceptions. Specific leaders and small numbers of regular people who scapegoated others and divided the world cleanly into us and them. But for months, the vast majority of people felt a visceral pull in the opposite direction, toward collective unity. Now imagine what might have happened had more of our traditions been designed to encourage that instinct for collaboration, rather than adversarialism?

By the fall of 2021, schools across the country had lost a staggering number of teachers, paraeducators, substitutes, bus drivers, and other staff who quit, retired early, got sick, or died because of the pandemic. In September 2021, 30,000 public school teachers gave notice. Florida had 67% more teacher vacancies than the previous year. California's largest school district had five times the number of teacher vacancies as in prior years; Fort Worth, Texas, was close behind with four and a half times the number of vacancies. A small Michigan district lost a quarter of its teaching staff, while statewide there was a 44% increase in midyear teacher retirements. Lacking enough staff to operate, some schools across the country temporarily closed; hired students to serve lunch during school hours; grouped classes together in the cafeteria, where building services workers or untrained parent volunteers supervised hundreds of students; and/or asked the National Guard to fill in as bus drivers and substitute teachers.

In Toronto, 16 of 20 (80 percent) wallets were returned. In a large follow-up with over 17,000 “lost” wallets across 40 countries, most were brought back, with return rates reaching 80 percent in several countries. 2. In 2023, the World Happiness Report—a global survey that asks about people’s experiences and actions each year—revealed that volunteering, donating to charity, and helping strangers all increased significantly during the pandemic. For all its horrors, the plague revealed massive wells of human kindness.

Helping other did wonders for volunteer's self-esteem. Why, if women showed such dedication and courage in this crisis, they could do anything - even vote in election!. Opponents argued that "the ladies" should not have the right to vote because they were too unstable, too emotional, too "fragile" to make important decisions without male guidance. Women's activities during the pandemic helped change minds. Thus, it was no accident that, in August 1920, most states approved the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitutions, which granted women to right to vote." ~ Very, Very, Very Dreadful Albert Marrin