April 21-27, 2024 is Volunteer Appreciation Week. To all our volunteers around the world, thank you for serving with us.
If you want to know how, Click here to join World Relief Volunteers in your local community.
For 80 years, World Relief has partnered with local churches and communities to boldly address the world's greatest crises. But what does partnership with churches and communities actually look like?
For the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who have served in world relief over the past 80 years, it begins with individuals saying yes to selfless acts that have a transformative impact.
Volunteering defines world salvation. It is about ordinary people sacrificing their time, money, and comfort to be a kind face, a kind hand, or a trusted guide to those seeking a brighter, more prosperous future.
Volunteer Appreciation Week is all about celebrating these stories of sacrifice. Laura Hornby, a World Relief volunteer in Greenville, South Carolina, has one such story.
Laura's volunteer story
Jump to Laura's interview ↓
Laura, a mother of young children, first learned about World Relief in 2016 from her sister, who was interning with World Relief in upstate South Carolina.
Her sister knew of a Burmese family with twin baby girls who had special needs. One of the girls was battling an illness and needed to see a specialist frequently. Laura, her trained nurse, offered to pick up mother and child and drive them to her appointment.
“I left the baby with the mother and then I went to pick up this mother and the baby,” Laura said. “This went on for several months and we developed a friendship. After this, I wanted to continue serving.”
We are grateful to our volunteers who serve around the world. Hear from Seraphina from Rwanda about how she is helping others thrive and prosper.
Laura quickly joined the original Good Neighbor team. The Good Neighbor Team is a group of church-based volunteers committed to walking alongside newly arrived refugee families as they rebuild their lives in the United States. Then, after changing churches in 2021, she helped plant the first church in the new church. Good Neighbor Team.
Laura also began volunteering with WELL (formerly known as Refuge Sports), an English language program for refugee women founded by a former missionary couple, and became WELL's coordinator in 2022.
At that time, there were only three students enrolled in the program. But as resettlement increased across the United States from Afghanistan and other regions, the program soon grew to the point where he was serving 23 patrons.
Advice and encouragement for volunteers
In honor of Volunteer Appreciation Week, I wanted to share some of Laura's wisdom, advice, and encouragement for volunteers from a recent interview with her.
Whether you've been volunteering with World Relief for a long time or are thinking of saying “yes” for the first time to joining us in taking bold action for others in your local community, she I hope these words inspire you.
How has your faith motivated your volunteer work with your refugee and immigrant neighbors?
It started with a very simple awareness. Biblical command to welcome foreigners. That's still a big part of it, but walking this story of being uprooted with my refugee friends and starting to build a new home here has informed my spiritual journey in many ways. I went into it.
What happens to them in a physical sense reflects the spiritual reality of every person. I mean, we're all lost and looking for a home. For believers, that home is Jesus. My welcoming feelings for him are pouring out, and I ask myself, “Who should I tell him?”
What challenges have you faced while volunteering?
Americans are very busy. Many people have heard about World Relief and are interested, but feel like they don't have time in their schedules. I felt that too. There were two small children at home. Ironically, I sent my children with their mother to take care of someone else. Rethinking how you approach your schedule and finding or creating time can be difficult.
Intercultural relationships also have their own inherent awkwardness at first. For example, the silence in the car when you are driving someone. It's just the intimidation factor of “I don't know if I can do it.” and “What shall I say?”
Many people will relate to these challenges. How did you overcome them?
Often I took my children with me. They are just as much a part of it as I am. They have spent hours driving people to their appointments in the backseat of our cars. And they've had more cross-cultural experiences at their age than I had at their age. I finally realized that volunteering is not something we have to protect our children from, but something that benefits us all.
They often open up the relationships we have with our families. Through them, I was able to connect with other moms. Having children is a common experience in itself, even if we don't speak the same language. There will always be some discomfort. I still have to take a deep breath and choose to show up or jump into new situations. But I experienced so much grace in that moment.
Why do you come back and jump into new situations?
It's a welcome blessing to those who come here for the first time. I show up with the intention of being welcoming, but I'm also being welcomed by people who don't know me and don't speak my language. They feel the same barriers that I feel even more so, but still choose to show up and work towards the relationship. They choose to share themselves with me. It's such a privilege.
How has participating in this type of service changed you?
I learned a lot from my Well students about simple things like navigating complex relationships and learning new ways to cook. I often come back to food because it is a symbol of culture and connection. They are eager to share it. That's because it's a way to share yourself across barriers. They taught me more ways to use ingredients like corn and rice that I had only used one way before. It symbolizes the need for humility in one's worldview and way of doing things. It reminds me that I always need to learn.
Have you seen how World Relief’s presence has benefited your community?
World Relief's resettlement efforts benefit communities by increasing urban diversity and bringing together people from different backgrounds and cultures.
If the church also becomes part of the resettlement process, significant changes can occur within the church itself. Even people who have had little prior cross-cultural experience can be changed by their relationships with World Relief clients, and those changes can ripple through the larger congregation.
What would you say to people who are thinking about volunteering to help the world?
Through volunteering, you have the potential to form lifelong friendships. It's so exciting to imagine 10, 15 years from now, how our kids will grow up together and how we'll continue to learn from each other. At a time when there is so much division and isolation in our culture, taking advantage of the opportunity to get to know someone whose story is very different from your own can be extremely positive.
The mother of the refugee family I partnered with gave birth to a baby just weeks after arriving here. Walking through the resettlement process with them gave us many opportunities to watch the baby grow. She is now 1 year old and a few weeks ago she walked up to me for the first time.
I was there when the mother entered the hospital to give birth. And now she's walking across her room. She was so touched by her gift of being able to share this past year with her family.Her mother thought it was strange that I was getting so emotional about it, but for me, watching this little girl grow up was a blessing to her family and others. I think it's a symbol of the roots that we're planting in our community.
Spreading the Embrace of Jesus Around the World
For Laura, volunteering and serving others serves as an extension of the embrace of Jesus. And that's what we believe World Relief Volunteers is doing to support our work around the world.
In 2023, 46,714 World Relief Volunteers served around the world and 4,440 churches were mobilized. It's about tackling the world's most pressing crises and transforming communities socially, economically and spiritually.
This Volunteer Appreciation Week, we celebrate the incredible work of these volunteers and sincerely thank them for the difference they make in lives around the world.
Are you ready to take the first step as a World Relief volunteer in your local community? Click the button below for your chance.
Nathan Spencer Previously, she worked as a communications intern at World Relief Memphis. He is currently a freelance writer and serves as Remember Media's full-time social media account manager. He earned his master's degree in Journalism and Strategic Media from the University of Memphis in 2022.
