By Jane Hess Collins:

Volunteering catapults my butt out of the house. Otherwise, as I discovered in the last 18 months since retiring from the United States Air Force, I’ll just sit in the fourth-floor loft of our townhouse, tapping away on the laptop about giving back.

Last month I decided to volunteer at least once a week (it’s now up to two or three times a week) with different nonprofits in the DC area, send out a few tweets while volunteering, write about it on my website then link it to Facebook and Twitter. The response from nonprofits and readers has been incredible, but the most surprising response has been from me. As I hop around the DC metro area, volunteering and tweeting, writing and promoting, I realized quite by accident that I’m not doing this because I love to volunteer.

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