Give Your Gift

To wrap up this week's theme of individuals making use of their unique skills to serve both their community and the global community, I want to highlight an organization that actually helps facilitate this process for individuals and nonprofits, Catchafire.

I was directed to their website by a post from their CEO and founder, Rachel Chong, over at the Fast Co.Exist blog entitled "Making Volunteering More Popular by Making it More Relevant":

"Last year, 26.3% of Americans volunteered, but only 1.8% of Americans volunteered their professional skills (PDF).

When people don’t have the option to volunteer in a way that draws on their strengths or their skills, when people don’t have the option to volunteer in a way that make sense to them, and when volunteering doesn’t result in an impactful outcome, people volunteer halfheartedly or they don’t volunteer at all. This is a pretty serious consequence. In fact, the volunteer rate in America over the past 10 years has dropped nearly 3%.

We need to give volunteering a make over. We need to make volunteering relevant again. In fact, 95% of nonprofits say they would like these services pro bono, but don’t know where to go to get them. If so much of the population has these skills to give away, and we’re able to convince these people to volunteer their skills, we have supply to meet this demand. I am confident that more than 1.8% of people want to volunteer their skills. We just need to give them the right opportunities."

I believe wholeheartedly in the mission of Catchafire of matching relevant skill sets with corresponding needs in the nonprofit world. In fact, it is exactly what we hope to do on a global level for our foreign partners and the communities in which they work and live once we get the appropriate tools and systems in place to make it happen. Stay tuned in the year to come for progress updates on the implementation of our volunteer program and how it will work to make this kind of skill-matching possible for us and our partners. In the meantime, if you have some special professional skills and a little free time to volunteer, why not head on over to Catchafire and see if they might be the right organization to help you match those skills to someone in need and make a truly impactful volunteer contribution this year.

Read the rest of Rachel Chong's post at Fast Co.Exist.