The Institute of Volunteering Research has released a new report, Young people, volunteering, and youth projects: A rapid review of recent evidence. (Well worth a read and a good place to start if you’re looking for sources of facts to back up a funding application.)

One of the things the report points out is that, in England, there have been few studies which look at longer term impact on volunteers or on wider social and community impacts of volunteer programmes. With youth unemployment rising, there’s a real need to understand one particular key long term impact: the link between volunteering and employability.

In the USA there have been useful studies assessing short, medium and long-term impacts of a range of schemes including Americorps and City Year. One example, Still Serving: Measuring the eight-year impact of Americorps on alumni, shows that sixty percent of AmeriCorps State and National volunteers go on to work in a nonprofit or governmental organization.

The City Year Experience Over Time: Findings from the Longitudinal Study of Alumni shows that more than three-quarters of City Year alumni reported that City Year had contributed to the development of their early careers, and their assessment of City Year’s impact remained relatively consistent over time. (With results like this, it’s great to see that US-based City Year is setting up a project in London.)

While evidence of the impact of volunteering on employment rates is mixed, research shows that young people perceive volunteering as enhancing their employability and employers value volunteering experience for improving skills such as communication, leadership, team work, and self-confidence.

In the medium to long term, existing research suggests that the experience of full-time volunteering, at least, can instil a lasting commitment to voluntary service, but gaps in research and evidence of the long-term impact of youth volunteering remain. v is starting to address this with a scoping study which aims to develop best practice and attract investment in research into the long-term benefits of youth volunteering.

Ashoka’s Youth Venture project ran the Invent Your World Challenge to  reward 16-25 year olds from all over the world for inventions that help their communities. The winners were a big hit at the recent Tech4Society conference in Hyderabad, India.

Still only 16 years old, competition winner Javier Fernández-Han invented an algae-powered energy system that combines a dozen new and existing technologies to treat waste, produce methane and bio-oil for fuel, produce food for humans and livestock, sequester greenhouse gases, and produce oxygen. The VERSATILE system is targeted at developing communities which need sources of power and waste disposal - and while it hasn’t actually been built yet, you’ve got to admire the sheer ambition of the project.

We also love Tractor Factor, designed by 23-year-old Shailesh Upadhyay from Velore, India. He found it difficult to study in the evenings at his home in rural India, so he came up with a system which uses the battery in a tractor to power a fluorescent light at night. It’s now being installed in homes throughout his village.

Really inspiring stuff for a Friday read - find out more about the winners here.

We were always going to fall in love with an “unincorporated disorganisation” who state their vision as “a world where volunteering  is as mainstream as cheeseburgers and breathing.” Youth Tree is a group of young volunteers from Western Australia who are shaking up volunteering Down Under.

They’ve just launched the Big Help Mob, a diverse army of 100+ young volunteers who regularly get together to do favours for non-profits. Then they celebrate with “enormous, ludicrous flash mobs”.

Any local non-profit can submit an idea for how this rent-a-crowd could help them out, via their website. The best ideas are taken on. So all kinds of causes, charities, people, animals or environments can benefit from a sudden, one-off burst of people-power.

Did we mention that we love it?

A new Haiti support page is harnessing the power of the crowd to help locate and identify missing persons. Volunteers can give just a few minutes of their time to sort and tag disaster images, and match sorted images with the faces of missing persons. The goal is to help desperate families find their loved ones.

Meanwhile, Crisis Camp Haiti kicks off in London tomorrow (Thursday 21 January). Crisis Commons facilitates partnerships and maintains a network of technology volunteers to respond to specific needs. The goal of the London session is to establish Crisis Commons London and a series of Crisis Camp events in London in support of Haiti, where both technical and non-technical people working together on tasks as diverse as coding apps, mapping work and translation.

But it is CyberMentors’ ability to forge partnerships with social networks that really stands out for me. YouTube is featuring CyberMentors on its front page all day today. And back in November, Bebo became the first social networking site to install a CEOP “report” button on the profiles of its 8 million users, featuring a link to the CyberMentors site.

By using social networks to offer reach out to young people in the very spaces where they might be bullied, CyberMentors helped over 176,000 young people with bullying and cyberbullying since its launch in March last year.

Lots of young people who’ve had horrible experiences are motivated to help others in the same situation. What’s great about CyberMentors is that it genuinely helps them to do that.

Young people, aged 11-25, are trained as CyberMentors, in schools and online, so that they can offer support to their peers. They’re also supported by trained counsellors, available online if needed, so site visitors always get the appropriate level of help, and younger volunteers are not in danger of having to deal with issues they’re not able to manage.

This video shows how using her experience of bullying to help others helped CyberMentors volunteer Georgia get her confidence back.

The vlabsblog team has been inspired and excited by the success of Help-Portrait, an innovative photography project which successfully spread masses of festive joy by creating 40,000 free portraits for people to treasure for a lifetime.

On Saturday 12th December, more than 8300 photographers and volunteers in 715 locations in 42 countries gave up their time for the project. The brief is beautifully simple: find someone in need. Take their portrait. Print their portrait. And deliver it to them. That’s it. Simple to do, but as the website shows, a photograph can mean the world to someone, perhaps making a person feel special for the first time in their lives.

Help-Portrait was founded by celebrity photographer Jeremy Cowart with his vision of the photography community and individuals giving back this holiday season.  This event reached a magnitude that nobody saw coming.

“On December 12th, cultural borders were crossed on one side of the camera and competitive borders on the other,” reflects Cowart. “I honestly don’t know which side of the camera was blessed more. For many of our subjects across the world, Help-Portrait provided them with their first-ever family photo. However, we’re consistently hearing from many photographers worldwide that this is the greatest thing they’ve ever done with their cameras.”

It’s a lovely way for photographers to be able to share their skills - structured enough to form a template for collective action, yet open enough to let each participant stamp his or her mark on the project. Best of all, each portrait is a memento of a personal interaction between photographer and model, between someone who deserves to feel special and someone who wanted to help. You just can’t buy moments like that.

With this new understanding, a toolkit was created for the volunteering sector to use and develop opportunities that were more relevant and enticing to young people.

The toolkit draws inspiration from “a new breed of social action brands”, emerging as a result of self-organising via The Internet. Homemade, authentic and innovative these organizations, initiatives and websites are creating new ways for people to give their time, take action and make a social difference.

Reimagining volunteering in a connected world: a process for developing creative new volunteering ‘products’ outlines how lessons from these new social action plans can help inspire innovation in the voluntary sector.

You can also view slides from a workshop based on this work on Slideshare:

Ethical fashion label 50FIFTY clothing, which is run by ex-teachers and youth workers, is pioneering an innovative way to combat the rising tide of gun and knife crime affecting young people in the UK.

They’ve combined their business knowledge and their previous lives in youth work to show young people (many of whom facing social exclusion) how to make money legally by designing, making and selling clothing and promotional goods. Through their Made by Young People project, the team says they’ve helped dozens of young people move from criminal activities into entrepreneurial ones.

With research warning that charities will lag behind the rest of the UK economy in recovering from the recession, it’s interesting to see Made by Young People offering to work with voluntary organisations to show them how to raise money through social enterprise. I’m really inspired by the thought of harnessing the talents and entrepreneurship of young volunteers and diversifying funding as a result.

Trekstock is a great example of this approach. It started as a simple idea from a young volunteer, Sophie Epstone, who wanted to put on a gig to raise money for a Teenage Cancer Trust trek. Since then, Trekstock has launched its own fashion line during London Fashion week, toured the UK festival circuit, gained charity status,  attracted support from big name celebrities and raised thousands of pounds in the process.

Sophie says: “It may look big now but it all started with a small idea to hold a little fundraiser for a trek and over time the ideas and the drive grew along with the hope that it was going to make a difference to the charities that it supported. I think that you have a great idea, how ever big or small, you must believe that it’s always doable and there is always support out there to help you make it grow.”

I’m sure there must be countless young volunteers out there bringing innovation and money to charities, and I’d be really interested to hear more about them.

The premise is simple.  Food retailers throw out millions of tons of edible food every year due to supply overstock.  Foodworks redirects this food so it can be used to cook nutritious meals for people in the local community that do not have access to healthy foods for a variety of reasons, such as lack of income or knowledge of healthy nutrition.  They do this by blagging free kitchen space and recruiting young volunteers to run the project.

The beauty of the Foodworks project is that makes value of under-utilised resources: food that was going to binned, kitchens that were left idle, and volunteers that who wanted something meaningful to do. It’s also easily replicable.  Those who want to set up their own Foodworks project are invited to get a group (preferably 3-4) of young people together from the local community, and, with support from Foodworks, conduct a feasibility study of the local area, and then start connecting idle resources in the community.

The organisation offers one-to-one support, marketing materials, contacts, help with the leagal side, and the initial seed funding to ensure that the project is off to the running start. It’s a voluntary franchise!

Foodworks proudly states that the voices of our volunteers are at the heart of our organisation: “We provide the tools, and let them take the lead.”

So simple, so economical and so effective.

I’ve just discovered Kickstarter, a US-based website which allows budding entrepreneurs to crowd-source the money they need to bring their ideas to life. A service designer I know called it “my favourite website of all time”, and I can see where he’s coming from.

Project creators can offer products, services or other benefits (”rewards”) to inspire people to support their project: A hot-air balloon ride to the first person to pledge $300, an invitation to the BBQ for anyone who pledges more than $5. It’s up to each project creator to sculpt their own offers to inspire people to invest.

From crocheted yurts to plans to write everyone in the world a letter, the site is packed with weird and wonderful ideas, but it’s the voluntary projects which really got me thinking - such as this appeal to save a local community garden. Could it be that by stepping away from the format of traditional funding applications, we could actually inspire more creative volunteering opportunities? The very act of selling a simple idea, rather than a huge project plan, seems like a more natural way to test out your idea on the general public. Winning public support could inspire courage to test the boundaries and be really innovative.

I’m a big fan of Junction 49 and its commitment to supporting young volunteers in working together to bring their ideas to life, as well as v’s vcashpoint project. I’d love to see what would happen if we could add crowd-sourced funding into the mix. Something tells me that these young volunteers could teach hardened fundraisers a few tricks, and inspire new creative approaches to promoting charitable giving.

I love the idea of voluntary projects having a whole group of supporters, right from the start, who care enough about a project to dig into their pockets to help make it happen. As Kickstart says, a large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement.