Western Service Workers Association
VOLUNTEER
Sign up for an Orientation and Activity
Contact WSWA’s Volunteers Coordinator to sign up for the next orientation and volunteer activity. You are invited to attend an orientation to learn about our goals, our gains, how we accomplished them and the many ways you can participate. Following the orientation, you can join an activity to learn practical skills of organizing while advancing the association’s efforts.
Learn Professional Organizing Skills
Find out about WSWA’s volunteer organizer training programs. We teach the organizing method and lessons that have created the most successful movement in this country for lasting change and advancement by and for low-paid service workers, elderly and disabled workers and other workers. In these troubled times, add your voice by joining WSWA to fight the government policies that cause and perpetuate poverty among the working poor.
Run Food, Clothing and Supply Distributions
Unite with WSWA members to build a free-of-charge, self-help benefit program to address members’ immediate needs, including distributing emergency food and clothing, and working with volunteer physicians, dentists, optometrists, lawyers and other professionals to provide urgently needed care.
Volunteer at Special Events
You can volunteer at special events like holiday food basket distributions, Back-to-School campaigns, the association’s anniversary and other celebrations. Seasonal events are designed by and for WSWA members to help offset unavoidable expenses while collectivizing strength for long-term solutions.
Western Service Workers Association -
Powering the Future with High Efficiency Volunteers!
Weekly Volunteer Activities
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Food Distribution
Fridays 8 am - 1 pm
WSWA members may apply to the association’s budget-saving Benefit Plan II program and participate in weekly free-of-charge supplemental food distributions, featuring fresh organic produce and other nutritional foods. Volunteers are needed year-round to pick up, sort, box and distribute food to enrolled members.
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Legal Advice Benefit
One Wednesday per month 5 pm - 9 pm
(Call for more information.)Volunteer attorneys present general legal information sessions in group settings as well as private legal advice consultations, accompanied by a WSWA lay advocate. Topics include wage theft, evictions, discrimination and predatory lending. WSWA needs more volunteer attorneys, legal advocates and interpreters.
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Preventive Medical Benefit
One Sunday per month 12 pm - 5 pm
(Call for more information.)Volunteer physicians and registered nurses conduct preventive general medical sessions, checking vital signs and medical history, providing routine health screenings and exams, assisted by a certified WSWA medical advocate. More volunteer medical professionals and advocates are needed!
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Benefit Advocacy
Wednesdays 9 am - 1pm and 6 pm - 9 pm
Service workers, domestic workers and other low-paid workers can’t win without organization. WSWA teaches the skill of advocacy. You can learn how to prevent utility shutoffs or restore utility service, how to expunge medical debt, and fight benefit denials for elderly, blind or disabled members.
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Membership Canvass
Saturdays 10 am - 4 pm
WSWA membership canvasses are the lifeblood of our grassroots service worker organizing drive. Alone and isolated we cannot achieve anything; united we can win! Volunteers canvass door-to-door in low-income neighborhoods where members and potential members live, to build organization where it’s needed the most.
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Publication Session
Sundays Noon - 4 pm
Join WSWA's publication staff! You can learn – or help teach – how to produce the next issue of WSWA's newspaper, the California Service Worker and our seasonal Sponsors Guide to tell the truth about low-income workers organizing for economic justice. We also need volunteers to design flyers. Call WSWA!
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Community Outreach
Fridays 1 pm - 7 pm and Sundays 10 am - 3pm
Volunteers set up information tables in front of grocery stores, at community events, churches, temples and other venues to promote WSWA so that others can join our cause. WSWA also offers speakers to enlist new friends and participants to come in and make a difference. Please call if you can volunteer or if you can host a WSWA information table and/or speaker.
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Mailout Session
Mondays 1 pm - 4 pm
Volunteers prepare and send letters about our current campaigns to people who have joined WSWA and have expressed an interest in volunteering or supporting WSWA. We need volunteers to help with the daily letter mailouts as well as to assist with the bulk mailing of WSWA’s membership newspaper and Sponsors Guide.
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Phoning Session
Mondays and Wednesdays 6 pm - 9 pm
Volunteers are essential to all of WSWA’s activities year-round. Volunteers conduct group telephone sessions to re-contact interested individuals met on community outreach and by word-of-mouth about participating with WSWA’s organizing activities 365 days a year.