Looking To Help Others This Year?

Barter Your Time And SkillsThere are almost 1,000 organizations worldwide that welcome volunteers, where you can trade your time and skills to help others in exchange for room and board. For professionals with special expertise—technical, financial or medical—there are numerous opportunities.

The Financial Services Corps, which can be reached at (212) 771-1400, sends qualified executives to help advise public or private sector agencies, primarily in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union on capital-markets development and central and commercial banking.

Retired businesspeople may want to check out the International Executive Service Corps at (202) 326-0280 or www.iesc.org, which sends volunteers to work as consultants in developing countries.

And those in the health profession can contact Health Volunteers Overseas at (202) 296-0928 or www.hvousa.org.

Many groups require no special skills such as Global Volunteers at (800) 487-1074 or www.GlobalVolunteers.org, which takes interested workers to developing regions of Europe to help on projects ranging from natural-resource development to teaching English.Caribbean Volunteer Expeditions at (607) 962-7846 or www.cvexp.org, teams up with local museums and national parks on historic-preservation projects. Volunteers—who don’t have to be architects—help measure drawings and document building surveys.