There are so many benefits to volunteering. You help your community, improve you’re own skills, and meet new people. Sometimes, you may even meet someone extra special. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we bring your a story of two volunteers who met on one of our projects and ended up husband and wife:

I moved to New York City from Washington D.C. in the spring of 1989, and soon realized that I wasn’t really doing anything useful with my free time. Then a work colleague told me about how New York Cares made it easy for young professionals to get plugged in to community service work in their spare time.

What I did not realize was that I was going to meet my future wife on a crosstown bus with the rest of the volunteers from a day of ice skating in Lasker Rink with children from a foster care home in Harlem.

Two years later we were coming back from our honeymoon to help out as Site Captains at one of the first New York Cares Days in East New York. Fast forward another 15 years, and I am in the third year of my new job as a New York City public school teacher leading a Youth Service Club as a faculty advisor for New York Cares at Pablo Neruda Academy in the Bronx.

I guess I would have to say that New York Cares is the kind of place that is there to grow up with you. New York Cares, I owe you big time, and I am enjoying the paybacks. Sally and Carl Barnes…happily married since September 1994 thanks to you!

By Carl Barnes

Have you ever met someone while volunteering? Let us know in the comments. If you haven’t, maybe it’s time to sign up for a volunteer project for more chances at love.