Make it all matter a little bit more by donating your precious and extremely valuable time. Volunteer alone, volunteer together, or get friends and family to tag along and volunteer as a group. Add to your ultragreen wedding by having charitable fundraisers or volunteer get-togethers as part of your prewedding parties. You could even include volunteering as a part of your bachelor or bachelorette party. Get your bridal party together and spend a day volunteering at a local Humane Society or animal shelter; hand out food at a food bank; give blankets, gloves, and hats to the homeless on a cold day; ladle out hot food at a soup kitchen; spend the day planting trees or flowers at a local park or school.

Finding Volunteer Opportunities

Organizations always need more volunteers than they can get. Schools, libraries, hospitals, senior citizen centers, children's organizations — so many need volunteers. ServiceLeader.org (www.serviceleader.org) has many great tips and ideas for volunteering. Network for Good (www.networkforgood.org) will help you search by state for volunteer opportunities.

Have a bridal shower or prewedding bash that is for a good cause:

• Have every woman invited to your bridal shower bring along an item of business clothing to donate to Dress for Success.

• Ask everyone to bring canned or boxed foods to donate to the local food bank.

• Get your entire wedding party together and spend the day working on a Habitat for Humanity house.

• Donate a Saturday morning to your local library and read to kids.

• Have an old-fashioned quilting bee. Project Linus (www.projectlinus.org) accepts new, handmade, washable blankets that can be given to children ages newborn to eighteen.

• Have a big barbecue/yard sale. Have everyone bring a dish to pass and something to sell in the sale. All money earned from the sale gets donated to the charity of choice.

• Have a wildlife party. Everyone who comes donates money at the door. All the money raised gets sent to your favorite wildlife organization.

If you feel as if you are being too pushy or feel that friends and family aren't into the volunteering thing, that's okay. You can volunteer on your own time without anyone else. There are many, many opportunities available.

Volunteer Vacations

Volunteer vacations are an excellent way to do good things while trying something new. A volunteer getaway is a way to experiment with public service and perhaps discover a passion for something you may want to explore in more depth: cataloging art in a museum, renovating and restoring a French castle, going on a real archaeological dig, rescuing and studying sea turtles, or even restoring railways around the world.

It can be a way to live out your dreams and to visit somewhere you've never been before, all while helping others and doing something good. A volunteer vacation is a great way to share an experience with members of your bridal party or a unique way to bond with your fiancé before the wedding. If you don't have any time before the wedding, a volunteer vacation might make a dream honeymoon.

For a volunteer vacation, you may only have to pay for transportation to and from the location. Many organizations provide room and board for volunteers, while some may only charge nominal fees like $10 a day or $150 a week to help cover costs for food. Other organizations may make you pay for everything. If you choose a volunteer getaway make sure you get all the details ahead of time so that there are no surprises.

There are many charitable organizations and U.S. groups that accept volunteers, such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (www.fws.gov), the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (www.blm.gov), the U.S. Forest Service (www.fs.fed.us), and many national and state parks.

Greenpeace (www.greenpeace.org) accepts volunteers for environmental activism, the National Audubon Society (www.audubon.org) takes volunteers all over the United States for habitat restoration, the Sierra Club (www.sierraclub.org/outings) plans outings that help clean up and preserve wilderness areas, and the Earthwatch Institute (www.earthwatch.org) and the Nature Conservancy (www.nature.org) take volunteers on many types of expeditions.

Appalachian Trail Conference (www.atconf.org) volunteers work along the Appalachian National Scenic Trail in various locations from North Carolina to Maine doing such tasks as building new trails and constructing shelters. You could help build and maintain forest trails in Colorado with the Colorado Trail Foundation (www.coloradotrail.org).

Go international. If wildlife is your thing, participate in the study of dolphins, manatees, howler monkeys, sea birds, whales, or sea turtles in the Bahamas, Belize, or the Peruvian Amazon through Oceanic Society Expeditions (www.oceanicsociety.org). Research humpback whales in Hawaii or Australia with Pacific Whale (www.pacificwhale.org) or help preserve sea turtles through the One World Work Force. Do maintenance work in Peru with Peruvian Safaris (www.peruviansafaris.com). Help save big cats at the Peace River Refuge and Ranch in Florida (www.peaceriverrefuge.org/volunteer.html) or travel to Namibia or Kenya with the Cheetah Conservation Fund and learn about cheetahs in the wild (www.cheetah.org).

You are sure to be amazed at all the adventure possibilities that are available for you to participate in. These are a very small fraction of what is available around the world. Check out Volunteer Vacations: Short-Term Adventures That Will Benefit You and Others by Bill McMillon. Make sure you get the newest edition, because he updates it quite regularly. Also check out the websites www.volunteertravel.com, www.charityguide.org/volunteer/vacations.htm, and www.volunteer.gov/gov for tons of volunteer opportunities and volunteer vacation information.