April is National Volunteer Month, where we celebrate spending our free time giving back to our communities, whether that means spending a weekend morning with a trash bag and grabber sticks or a weekday evening lending a helping hand to employees of non-profit businesses.

At Neighborhoods.com, we believe in giving back to the communities and neighborhoods that have enriched our lives.

Our first volunteer event took place in Chicago’s Logan Square, a neighborhood many Chicagoans (not to mention several Neighborhoods.com employees) are proud to call home. Community pride fueled us through that gray October morning as many passersby thanked us as we filled several bags with trash along the neighborhood’s main thoroughfares. Our favorite find: a discarded car door.

We followed that up with a trip to Chicago’s historic Hyde Park neighborhood, site of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and the future home of the Obama Presidential Library. We spent an unseasonably warm November afternoon tidying up the park, making it a more enjoyable place for the neighborhood’s residents.

For our next event, we put down the trash bags and picked up some puppies. PAWS, a local non-profit organization that provides animal adoption services, gave us the honor of helping out for an evening at their Lincoln Park location. The team learned that running a no-kill animal shelter is more than just playing with animals — it requires immense infrastructure, planning, and, of course, the helping hands of local volunteers.

Neighborhoods.com also got into the spirit of giving over the holiday season, raising over $1,000 for a toy drive to benefit Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital. We also collected four large boxes of food for the Greater Chicago Food Dispository, one of Chicago's most impactful charity organizations.

From all of us here at Neighborhoods.com, we wish you a happy National Volunteer Month. To find out more about volunteer opportunities in Chicago, check out the Chicago Cares website. Follow us on Facebook to check out our upcoming volunteer events: an Earth Day clean up on April 22nd and a Chicago River clean up on May 13th.