Last week was commemorated as National Volunteer Week by the Points of Light institute, an organization that promotes volunteerism and civic engagement. Both nationally and locally, volunteer-related developments made headlines. Bloomberg unveils new volunteer initiative At a rally in Washington Heights on Monday, April 20, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a new program, NYC Service, designed to encourage New...

An item in this morning’s Daily News says that the four New York schools participating in the Experience Corps program will likely lose city funding to renew it this year.  The program places people over age 55 in schools to tutor children with reading. Apparently private money has been hard to get as well, so the New York schools will probably lose their tutors soon. According to the Daily News article,...

Leah Todd of SafeWalk is ready to walk you home. Photo: J. Flood If you feel sketchy walking home in Brooklyn late at night and you don’t want to spring for a cab, there’s someone you can call. Starting in May, SafeWalk, a burgeoning volunteer program, will see people home on Friday nights from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m., serving Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Clinton Hill and Fort Greene. At...

Earlier this week New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a series of initiatives to help nonprofit organizations weather the economic downturn. Noting that the nonprofit sector employs nearly 500,000 New Yorkers, the mayor said it was important to take what he called “concrete steps to strengthen the sector and make it thrive.” These measures include an expansion of the city’s loan...

Books Through Bars volunteers Jess Ross and Natsumi Paxton at work on a recent Sunday. In a tiny basement room on 4th Ave in Brooklyn, bibliophiles gather to sort and package books to send to prisons all over the country. This is the home of Books Through Bars, a non-profit, volunteer-run organization designed to provide books that incarcerated people can’t get in their limited or nonexistent libraries. Jess...