Volunteering With Expertise: Giving What You're Good at
A large-scale study published in 2025* examined, across two decades of data, how helping behaviors affect cognitive health.
The study analyzed two types of helping activities:
- formal volunteering (help provided within organizations),
- informal helping (support given to friends, neighbors, within the community).
What does the research show?
According to the study's clear findings:
👉 helping behaviors are associated with better cognitive functioning, they slow cognitive decline,
👉the effect accumulates, meaning the longer the helping role is sustained, the stronger the positive impact.
👉 The strongest positive effect – better cognitive functioning and slower decline of brain functions – was observed when people spent approximately 2–4 hours per week regularly engaged in helping activities.
Less than this did not produce a sufficiently strong effect, while more could already lead to overload and saturation.
Beyond cognitive stimulation, voluntary helping activities also have strong emotional, mental, and psychological effects**
👉 Cognitively stimulating, slows brain aging
Helping activities often involve
- new situations,
- problem-solving,
- adaptation,
- teaching, explaining,
- connecting with others.
People use their thinking and knowledge differently than in their daily routine tasks.
This is not only a good feeling, but it also supports mental freshness, learning, and better long-term cognitive condition.
👉 Emotionally and mentally protective, increases psychological resilience
It brings joy. It gives purpose. It builds self-confidence and positive self-esteem. It strengthens the feeling of being useful. It creates human connections. It reduces stress and anxiety.
👉 A well-designed volunteering program is not an extra burden, but can have a regenerative effect, can contribute to employees' emotional and mental well-being, improve their psychological resilience, and can have a retention effect.
When an organization consciously designs volunteering and helping activities, it not only activates an organizational resource, but also genuinely invests in its people and in itself.
🎁 Solution-focused questions for organizations that want to help others by using their own activities, professional knowledge, and experience
❓ What are we truly good at as an organization? What knowledge, experience, and professional resources do we have that could provide real help to others?
❓ Where is there a real need for this knowledge? Not in general terms, but in specific communities, organizations, or causes.
❓ Which employees would be willing and credible to take part in this?
❓ What learning and development opportunities does volunteering offer for those involved?
💡 Suggestions for selecting the right organizational volunteering activities
- Do not choose the cause first, choose the competence. Start from what the organization is strong in, what professional knowledge is present that can be used for good.
- Look for forms of support where this knowledge truly matters
- Make participation voluntary.
- Define healthy boundaries.
- Recognize the helping role, but do not let it become invisible extra work.