5-Minute Commitments | How to bring more self-efficacy into your everyday life

Social commitments and volunteering are important social factors for the majority of Germans. An Omniquest study from 2020 found that over two-thirds of respondents see a great need for more volunteering. At the same time, the number of those who actually get involved themselves is only around 21 percent.

The main reason often given for this is a lack of time. But many people also shy away from the organizational effort involved in finding the right commitment and contacting organizations, as we found out in our 2020 Volunteer Survey (click here to see the study).

With our new category of 5-minute commitments, we want to offer a simple solution to this problem. This type of commitment is independent of non-profit organizations and can therefore be integrated into your everyday life without much effort – whether on the way to work, during a walk at the weekend or just in between. They not only give you the nice feeling of doing something meaningful for people and nature in your immediate neighborhood, but also bring variety and new impulses into your everyday life.

We present three of these 5-minute commitments here and hope to inspire you to integrate more commitment into your everyday life. You can find the complete selection of 5-minute commitments at vostel.de.

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Place food for native wild birds

As soon as the days get colder, our birds are on the lookout for food from morning to night in order to absorb as much energy as possible and thus get through the winter well. You can help them do this by setting out special food for them.

Which food is best suited for this, how you can make it yourself – with a little more time – as well as instructions for building a bird feeder can be found in the commitment description. With this, we wish you a lot of fun with feeding birds.

Use public bookcases in your city

Public bookcases are a fantastic way to make books you’ve already read available to others for free, while finding great new reading material for yourself. You can easily find bookcases in your city via the OpenBookCase site.

Donate money purposefully to organizations or individuals in everyday life

Donations are a good way to get involved, because you can use them to support specific organizations in their work or people in need in their everyday lives. In general, you have 3 options: a direct donation to people in everyday life (e.g. vendors of street magazines), an indirect donation to organizations that work on certain issues or a permanent donation as a sustaining member of an organization.

All you have to do: think about the purpose for which you would like to donate money and what budget you would like to use for it (daily, weekly, monthly). This way you can make giving a meaningful part of your life.

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You can find all 5-minute commitments at any time on vostel.de. Do you have additional ideas for simple commitments that can be easily integrated into everyday life? Then write to us at hello@vostel.de. We look forward to hearing from you 🙂

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