I was fortunate enough to be asked to write a series of articles on volunteerism in our community. The first one was “The Benefits of Volunteerism,” which outlined some of the advantages of choosing to volunteer. The second article, “Where Have All of the Good Volunteers Gone?”, discussed reasons why volunteerism has recently declined. This third piece will simply lay out three volunteer leadership opportunities that exist in our community. Hopefully, a few volunteers will step forward to help.

The first opportunity to lead would be to come up with a solution for our furry friends that need to be spayed or neutered. At the present time, the City of Ellsworth cannot fund a full-time animal control officer. Several of our citizens have been filling the gap by taking cats to vets in our general region to be spayed or neutered. Sometimes they use their own funds to make this happen. If all of those citizens would join together, collaborate and come up with a plan, I believe it is possible to get a better grip on this dilemma.

No less important would be for us to create a simple way to welcome newcomers to our community. In addition, we will need to follow up with them to make sure they are able to navigate the challenges that occur. It has been consistently reported that we can get people to move to our area, but we aren’t very good at keeping them. This is a simple thing to do. Just show up, have a conversation and show up again at six-month intervals for a while. Moving is a hard thing to disguise. All you have to do is find a moving truck and you are in luck. You have found a new resident.

The final volunteer opportunity that could provide our community with a boost would be to create a catalog or an online database that highlights all of the volunteer opportunities available in our area. This could be something someone does solo. All you would have to do is call the different organizations and find out their current contact information, current needs and mission. Once the catalog has been completed, all one would have to do is update it annually. This could be an opportunity that could also be transferred to someone else when the time comes.

With all of this said, hopefully something good will come from these articles. Each of these opportunities listed above could propel you to something even more amazing. We each have 168 hours in a week. Some of our hours go into work, sleep, family, worship, school, friends, activities and other endeavors. What if all of us made a conscious effort to give just one additional hour a week to volunteerism? I believe this one change would help take our area to a new level. Positivity is contagious. It is a hard force to stop once it has started.

Daniel A. Finnegan is the mayor of Ellsworth and can be reached via email at dfinnegan@ellsworthks.net.