The Woohoo! Report

The concept of micro-volunteering, where people give their time to benefit worthy causes in bite sized chunks, got a boost this week when it was announced on 19th October that an initiative called Help From Home was awarded the Runner Up prize in a UK nationwide ‘How To Make A Difference‘ competition from an entry field of over 100 ‘empowering’ community changing projects.

The decision to award the Runner Up prize to ‘Help From Home’ was based on the impact the initiative was making in society through its efforts to encourage people to spend their spare time at home more purposefully through micro-volunteering opportunities. ‘Help From Home’ currently lists over 450 easy, no committment home based volunteering actions, most of which can be accomplished in just a pair of pajamas!

Most people’s perception of volunteering is that of joining a group of people at a certain place and a certain time to participate in an action that will benefit others. These days with the advent of micro-volunteering, it can be performed on the go, on demand or whilst still dressed in that pair of pajamas! Time wise, a spare 10 seconds upto 30 minutes is all that’s needed to help out worthy causes -  whether you’re in your own home, on the bus or waiting for someone in a restaurant. For instance, you can feed a starving person for free with just a simple click of a mouse, tackle climate change via your mobile as well as putting a smile on a terminally ill child via email.

Micro-volunteering is certainly coming of age these days, as two other websites aside from ‘Help From Home’ also provide and promote actions that can be completed in under 30 minutes from virtually anywhere in te world. For people with mobiles, The Extraordinaries provide volunteer opportunities on-the-go with their iphone app, whilst the CharityGuide’s flexible ‘Volunteer on Demand’ actions could be the answer for people with unpredictable schedules.

All in all then, there really is now no excuse not to be able to volunteer your time. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of opportunities out there all vying for your spare couple of minutes. As the tagline from ‘Help From Home’ succinctly puts it, you really can ‘Change the world in just your pajamas’!

Background Information

The ‘How To Make A Difference’ awards were run by Community Channel and Media Trust for ’small ground breaking projects that are making a BIG difference’ in society. The competition announcement page can be found here.

Help From Home was set up in October 2008 to inspire people to use the spare time they have at home to help out worthy causes from around the globe and so make the world a better place to live in. There are 3 categories of positive actions to choose from, these being ‘Charity’, ‘Green’ and ‘Advocacy’. ‘Help From Home’ also runs two other initiatives – it’s ‘Do Good’ cards which encourages people to spread random acts of kindness where the impact of these actions can be tracked around the world and its ‘Volunteer Challenge’ scheme’ which encourages people to perform a defined number of home based volunteer actions.