The Ordinary Superpower

I Never Thought I was Qualified

For a long time, I believed volunteering was for a certain kind of person.

The kind with extra hours, a deep calling, maybe a gap year and a bamboo water bottle. I was none of those things. as a first-year student juggling assignments, internship applications, and the quiet anxiety of not knowing where I was headed.

I didn’t have a story. But I had 3 hours.

And somehow, that turned out to be exactly enough.

What You Can Actually Do Starting This Weekend

Nobody is asking you to move mountains. Here are four real, ordinary things that regular people do through YFS. No special skills, no dramatic origin story required.

Health: Be Someone’s First Step

Hospitals are overwhelming. For a lot of families, especially first-generation city migrants, navigating a government health system alone feels impossible. 

At YFS, volunteers help connect people to YFS’s telemedicine services and the Arogya Nidhi medical fund, which covers treatment costs for those who simply can’t afford them. You don’t need a medical degree.

You need a phone, some patience, and the willingness to make one call on someone’s behalf. Sometimes being healthy starts with someone who cares enough to ask, “Have you seen a doctor for that?”

Environment: Show Up With Your Hands

There’s something quietly powerful about a lake cleanup on a Saturday morning.

It doesn’t ask anything complicated of you. YFS runs plantation drives and river and lake restoration events across 13+ states, and they happen regularly. You show up. get muddy. You go home tired in the best possible way. The lake doesn’t care about your resume. And somewhere between pulling out a plastic bag tangled in a water hyacinth and looking up at a cleaner shoreline, something shifts in you too.

Education: Give One Hour a Week

There are children in Abhyasikas learning centres… kids from underserved communities who are bright, curious, and behind on paper.

Not because they aren’t capable; but because nobody sat with them to explain a concept twice. YFS volunteers step in here. You don’t need a teaching degree. You need to remember what it felt like to not understand something, and what it meant when someone finally explained it in a way that clicked. NMMS coaching, spoken English, STEM sessions.

Pick one. Show up once a week. That’s it.

A few hours of your Sunday. A child who gets it, because you stayed patient, and the legacy they’ll carry that forward in ways you’ll never fully know.

Social Well-being: Be Present

This one is the quietest, and maybe the most underrated.

YFS’s SevaCircle initiative brings together volunteers for civic participation. Supporting elders, helping with community events, working on issues that make a neighbourhood feel like a neighbourhood again. Sometimes social well-being just means someone noticed.

Someone asked how an elderly resident on the third floor was doing. Someone organised a small community gathering that reminded people they weren’t alone in the same building for years.

You don’t need a cause. You need that sense of belonging to each other that we’re all quietly starving for in cities that keep getting bigger and lonelier.

The Thing Nobody Tells You

 When I started, thought I was giving something Time. Energy. A Saturday.

What I didn’t expect was to receive so much… not as a reward, but as a consequence. You realise that the world is full of people trying. Quietly, stubbornly, without recognition. And when you step into that world even briefly, you stop feeling like a spectator to your own life.

A volunteer once told me, “I came to help. I didn’t know I was the one who needed it.”

thought about that line more than I can count.

You Don’t Have to Be Extraordinary

You just have to show up. Once,then maybe once more.

That’s the whole secret. There is no other secret.

Samanvitha R / Volunteer
Bengaluru