What I need is to be useful to my community

What's been going around in my head is that I need help, but I have 3 doctors, a counselor, a good family, and at least one friend, and it doesn't touch me.  Whatever I need, it's not what they have.  Today, I have a new theory: what I need is to be useful to my community.

A few things lead me to that idea:

1. I read of someone going to a retreat, coming back feeling inspired, but then regular life resumes and nothing has changed.  That's what I find.  Any time I go away to something inspiring, then I come back and I have the same old life.  The article went on to say that what people need is not a retreat, but a community to provide ongoing support.
2. Someone sent an email out asking for someone to watch her kid for two hours.  Someone else replied right away volunteering, so I don't have a chance this time.  That's probably just as well, since I'm kind of sick, and wouldn't want to contaminate the kid.  But I realized how much I wanted to do it, and I told her I would do it next time.  
3. When I am able to do some small thing that is useful to someone, it means a lot to me. Actually I find I can be overly needy about wanting to do things for people.  That's not to say I just want to work hard on onerous tasks for anyone.  It has to be someone I actually want to do things for, and a task I want to do.  

Some people do useful things for their community as part of their job.  My job used to be like that.  It's not any more.  So now there's this hole in me, that comes from not being useful to my community.  That's what I need to work on, to get involved in things with people, where I can be useful.  And hopefully some day, I can find a job that meets that need, because it's inefficient to have to both do a job and also do something else that's useful to my community.