Today's post is written by Chelsea Murphy, Communications Coordinator at Points of Light.  An avid sports enthusiast, and a recently converted smart phone user, she likes doing good through buying fair trade coffee and recycling daily.

What is a volunteer? Is it someone who physically paints or plants a garden with their hands at a service project? Is it a person serving at a soup kitchen on Sunday mornings? Is it a neighbor who picks up trash in your neighborhood? Yes- but a volunteer can mean more than that.

Many people are stuck in this rigid definition of what a volunteer is. At Points of Light we want to stress that 21^st century volunteering means a lot more than just physically participating at a service project.  You can volunteer through your time, talent, voice, and money- while you are on your iphone waiting for your children to get out of school, or when you are on line waiting to check-out. Even choosing to go to the farmers market instead of your local Kroger or Stop & Shop means you are volunteering because of your choices to spend your money locally.

You can micro-volunteer on your cell phone at any point during the day.  You don’t need to commit a lot of time.  Most of the mobile activities are designed to be done in four minutes or less, some projects include reporting on pot holes, reporting pollution, helping translate text, and various other photo tagging opportunities.

Support causes you care about through your actions or voice. Have you stood up to a bully lately? That’s volunteering.

How many hours a day do you spend watching TV? Don’t feel guilty, we all do it, but maybe you can volunteer to save some of the environment at the same time- here are a couple of ways you can enjoy your TV while reducing your energy consumption:

• Invite friends over- Why watch TV by yourself when other people who would be watching the same programs in their own houses could come over and share your electricity.
• Adjust the screen brightness. Your TV has several brightness settings. The brighter you set it, the more energy it will use.
• Lower the volume a little. Do you need to blow out your ear drums during the action scenes? (Sometimes the answer is yes) The higher the volume, the higher the electricity usage.
• Unplug your DVD players and game systems when they aren’t in use (you can't always be playing guitar hero 24 hours-a-day)- these systems are often sucking power out of the wall when you think they're "off".
• Turn the TV off when you leave the room.

Like the examples above you can do small acts to support the causes you care about- it doesn’t always have to be large gestures.  Do good every day.

You might not realize you are volunteering, but you are when you give money to the homeless, when you are sharing your lunch with your classmate, or buying girl scout cookies from the girl next door.

Comment and share with us- How do you do good and volunteer?