Portland resident Emily Gilliland has embarked upon an ambitious project: to volunteer one hour per day for 2008. Having read that the average adult her age volunteers around three hours per month, she vowed to explode passed that benchmark and give back to her community in the process.

And, at the same time, she keeps a blog about her experiences: the V365 blog.

Emily's project shows me just how much power each of us has to make a difference in our community. If follow her example and give an average of an hour per day, imagine what we could do? How many children could learn to live and love reading through the Start Making a Reader Today (SMART) program? How many different community organizations, neighborhood boards, city-wide committees, or non-profits could see their effectiveness increase beyond their wildest dreams? How many lives could we affect and change?

For Emily, it's all about the transformative power of volunteerism, as she puts it in her blog:

I believe in the power of service to transform others. There is research out there that says if students volunteer they are better citizens… they vote and participate in community activities. There are academic outcomes when service is incorporated in a curriculum. Now, I don’t think it is exactly figured out yet what makes some service activities transformative, but those exist. Right? Some people have an experience and they can’t go back.

To answer her question, they absolutely do. While the trickle-down has proven an abysmal failure in economic policy, it is seminal for volunteerism. If you give time to really change someone's life, I'd bet that person will pay that favor forward.

But, more specifically, this isn't about who we are as a city and as a people. Emily puts it well:

I define values as things that one can’t justify. When I think of my values, service is there at the top.

Volunteerism is the most progressive of values: giving and getting nothing in return beyond knowing that you've made a difference. It's giving and knowing that the cumulative volunteer effort can move mountains, literally plant forests, and affect a region's policy and way-of-being.

So, what can you do? Well, that's easy: give! If you challenge yourself to meet even half of Emily's goal, then our city and our people will be much better off for it. Help out at a homeless shelter. Get involved with a progressive, grassroots campaign. Apply to serve on a city, county, or region-wide commission. Plant trees. Anything!

If we all follow Emily's example, our future will be bright. But it'll take work, and time.