Volunteering somewhere unfamiliar will make you uncomfortable for an hour and grateful for a month.

Volunteering somewhere unfamiliar is uncomfortable for about an hour, while you do not know where anything is and everyone else already has a rhythm. What stays afterward is a bigger picture of the place you live and of how many people are doing steady, unglamorous work inside it. Neither of those arrives from reading about it.

Sign up for one shift rather than an ongoing commitment. Go where you will be useful instead of where you will feel good, and do what the regulars tell you. Treat everyone there as people getting something done, not as a lesson arranged for you.