Posts Tagged ‘virtual volunteering’
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Digital volunteers help Haiti
Back in June, we blogged about micro-volunteering project The Extraordinaries. In the wake of the Haiti disaster, the site is now catering to the huge numbers of people inspired to help by offering volunteers a real opportunity to make a difference to the relief effort.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.
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Cybermentors virtual volunteers take on the bullies
CyberMentors, the online peer mentoring scheme run by BeatBullying, is in the headlines today after its hard-hitting new advert was banned from TV for being “too brutal for younger audiences”.
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.
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Young people: Living online?
Recent stories regarding young people’s use of the internet and social media have raised an interesting question mark on an assumed trend; that young people live online.
First came the research note into young people’s media habits wrote by a 15 year-old intern at Morgan Stanley. The note, which describes his friends’ declining social media habits ended up on the front page of the Financial Times and caused a stir with City investors and media analysts alike.
And although it received a bashing on the blogs for being the views of one young guy, the launch of Ofcom’s Communications Market Report 2009 seemed to back up part of the note by reporting that in the 15-24 age group, use of social networking sites declined from 55 per cent in the first quarter of 2008 to 50 per cent in 2009. This contrasts with Ofcom’s findings in 2006 which highlighted social media as the next big thing for 15-24 year-olds.
Gerry Greaney/Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
So what are young people doing online?
There is of course lots of research to quote in answering that question, but most of it is contradictory.
One interesting answer comes from Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper’s and the author of “And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture.” Wasik believes that as ‘old-model’ opportunities disappear in the real world; jobs, internships and grants, young creatives are turning to the Bright Lights, Big Internet to get their big break. Suggesting the growth of much more entrepreneurial and creative uses for the web when the real world is letting them down.
On life online and keeping creativity alive in the recession, check out ‘A little rant about ‘the lost generation’.
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Can international volunteering be truly accessible for all young people?
The government’s decision to give Raleigh £500,000 to support graduates “who otherwise could not afford” to volunteer abroad has had a mixed reception. While the “creative thinking” was welcomed by the NUS, some previous volunteers complained that it was “unfair” to those who had raised the full cost of the trip themselves, while others claimed that these “free gap years” could still end up costing upwards of £2,000.
Many young people are sold on the value of international volunteering. DFID research published in December 2008 showed that while 19% of the general adult population think volunteering is effective at reducing poverty overseas, that number increases to 32% in the 16-24 year old age group. But is international volunteering still the preserve of the middle classes? There are several schemes in the UK which hope to prove otherwise.
Charlotte Singleton, a volunteer youth worker from Manchester, spent 10 weeks teaching in a school in Himachal Pradesh, northern India. Her placement was fully funded by Platform 2, a global volunteering scheme for 18 to 25 year olds who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford to visit a developing country, funded by the Department for International Development.
She said: “I didn’t think that people like me could do something like this. I thought it was just for people who were rich… I’d never been on an airplane before. The farthest I’d been was Wales.”
Latitude Global Volunteering offers a range of fully funded placements and bursaries for 16-25 year olds who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford to volunteer.
Meanwhile, virtual volunteering opportunities allow young volunteers to help international charities from the comfort of their own homes. WorldWide Volunteering now offers virtual volunteering options, and the UN Online Volunteers Service also has opportunities for volunteers aged 18+.
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On-demand volunteerism by mobile phone
A perceived lack of time is one of the biggest barriers to volunteering, and virtual volunteering is often cited as an ideal solution for time-strapped people, so when I stumbled upon The Extraodinaries, I was fascinated. This American initiative delivers micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones, from translating a charity’s website into a foreign language to identifying craters for NASA or birds for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The theory is simple: everyone has moments of spare time, so what if everyone used these moments for the common good?
The Extraordinaries blog claims: “Thus far, no-one has brought crowdsourcing to mobile phones… the device that’s always on-hand when people have spare time. And while there have been one-off efforts to turn crowdsourcing to social good, no-one has built an organization dedicated to the purpose. With The Extraordinaries, we’re pioneering a promising new field.”
The service is currently in Beta testing, and is only available on the iPhone. I’d be really interested to hear from anyone involved in the Beta testing. If you’d like to find out more about how the service works for voluntary organisations, watch the interview with co-founder Jacob Colker on Volunteer Match’s Engaging Volunteers blog.
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Nice piece, yourself.
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