There are more ways to volunteer now than ever before. With an ever-increasing number of service organizations springing up to meet the needs of an ever-increasing population, an expansion of interest in and action on our environment, and a NonProfit community nationally recognized for the depth and scope of its involvement, if you care about anything in the Twin Cities, there is a way to volunteer your time to help that thing.

But with such a variety of ways to volunteer in our communities (like some kind of all-you-can-serve lunch buffet of civic engagement), where is an active citizen to go in order to find out about all of these opportunities? Where is this lunch buffet?

Well, the closest thing out there is: us! At www.handsontwincities.org you can find volunteer listings from over 300 local non-profits on our easy-to-use volunteer search database. There is also a Project Calendar, featuring one-time volunteer service projects all over the Twin Cities that you can sign up for online! There are a few similar web-based services out there, such as volunteermatch, The United Way, and 1800 Volunteer, but Hands On Twin Cities is the only searchable database designed for Minnesotans by Minnesotans, and exclusively featuring volunteer opportunities in the Twin Cities and surrounding area. Also, our blog is more entertaining than anything you'll find on those other sites.

Unfortunately, even Hands On Twin Cities cannot know all there is to know about volunteerism in the Twin Cities - there are just too many ways to get involved. Another great place to look for volunteer opportunities is the land of print media, or - as they used to say back in the days of the telegraph - newspapers!

The Pioneer Press and Star Tribune each run weekly segments (Thursday and Saturday, respectively) on ways to get involved in your community, featuring ads for specific volunteer opportunities and events. The City Pages and The Rake each feature listings of volunteer opportunities in their classified sections (Hands On Twin Cities helps assemble these listings). Neighborhood newpapers can be a good bet, too. In this week's issue of The Northeaster, there is a 1 1/2 page spread featuring numerous volunteer opportunities and organizations in Northeast Minneapolis.

Newspapers cannot, by their physical nature, include a snazzy searchable volunteer databse with over 2,000 volunteer opportunities (like ours), but sometimes this is a good thing. If you have no idea what kind of volunteer opportunity you're looking for, it might be more tedious to cruise a database than to look at a selected sample of current volunteer needs.

The bottom line is, there are lots and lots of places to look for volunteer opportunities. They range in difficutly from pretty easy (clicking a mouse), to also pretty easy (opening a newspaper), so there's really no excuse for not finding an opportunity that works for you. Log onto www.handsontwincities.org today, or pick up any one of the fine newspapers discussed in this article.

In my day, we read the 'ol village chalkboard to find out about Volunteer Opportunities. And we liked it!