Hannah Perez doesn’t always have a lot of spare time, but part of the reason is that she spends it giving to others through volunteering. She has done many things, from Beach Clean-Ups to helping out at Food Banks. “For a while I helped an elderly lady clean her home every other day,” she said. Perez actually thought it was fun and funny because things like that sometimes feel like more of a chore when you’re doing it in your home but “it’s way more fun doing it for other people,” she said.

Perez feels like a better person when she volunteers and she said that doing so helped her grow. “When you start to do things for other people, you begin to feel really fulfilled when you see the impact you’re making on their lives, even if its small.”

“Lifting the load for people,” as Perez sees it, was not something that she chose to do. At first, she did it because she had a required amount of service hours she had to do for the International Baccalaureate (IB) program and because it looks good on college applications. She has come to love it and does it even though she has met the requirements.

Perez has been volunteering for four years and said that it is really easy and anyone can do it. She shared that there are many places to volunteer, like local food banks, and she has learned many things from her experience. She learned that “making things easier for somebody else is a lot easier to do than it might seem,” she said. “We often focus on ourselves and our own troubles, but rarely do we take time out of our own schedules to help somebody else’s struggles… I learned how important it is to make sacrifices and how great the outcome can be.”