The Bloomington Volunteer Network is asking residents to complete 100,000 hours of volunteer service hours this year. The Be the Change challenge is for the current calendar year.

Anyone who has been volunteering for the community since the challenge started has been contributing toward the goal.

Volunteer opportunities include food pantries and kitchens, homeless shelters and animal shelters. Environmental sustainability programs and arts and theater companies also offer opportunities.

Aubrey Seader, the city’s volunteer coordinator, said the challenge reflects Mayor Kerry Thomson’s values of “co-creating your community.”

There are many ways to co-create your community like being a business owner or being a non-profit leader. Community service is another way anyone can do it, Seader said.

“We're trying to get more people to join organizations and to be volunteers, and we're trying to show them how easy that it is, and also how good for them it will feel,” she said.

Being a volunteer, especially for non-profit organizations, helps sustain and grow the organization, and it also allows people to pursue causes they care about. When one volunteers for places like homeless shelters or for food kitchens, they are helping provide the community with essential services, she said.

“You are feeding and clothing and housing people who are in need, and that's really important to keeping our community healthy,” Seader said.

Seader said she hopes to announce soon that 50,000 hours have been reached at the halfway mark.

Seader said as part of the annual Be More Awards this year in April, the individual and organization with the most hours for the challenge will be honored.

Bloomington High School South student Winnie Dong won the 2026 Be More Creative Award for her WFHB youth radio show “What the Health?!”

Dong started volunteering when she was 10 years old. Coming from a low-income family, she said, meant some opportunities were not available to her.

“I think that volunteering is really a place where people can come together and work on something,” she said. “And even though they might have differences in their values, opinions, ideologies, and all of that other stuff, they're able to come together towards a cause that all of them collectively care about.”

Besides her radio show, Dong volunteers at the Bloomington Animal Shelter. She does seasonal work volunteering at Bloomington’s Strawberry Shortcake Festival and the Farmers Market. She also volunteers for the City’s Parks and Recreation for Weed Wrangles and Community Zoo by You, the Monroe County Library and Hoosier Hills Food Bank.

Dong said the challenge can help the city become stronger through volunteering.

“When you work together collaboratively in such a way that also impacts the living space that you're in, where you can see like the difference and the impact that you're making within your community, I think that not only will you have a better bond with those people that you already might know or might have friends in, you can even make more friends and really, I guess, have a family within this volunteer space,” she said.