90% of people want to volunteer globally. Less than 25% of people actually do. Give Your Skills focus is to turn good intents to good actions, to support the 65% of the global population, who would like to make a difference but don’t, to take positive action.
We believe the current volunteer-charity paradigm is sub-optimal for both parties.
For Volunteers there are a number of fears/challenges (Source: Stanford Center for Longevity):
- I don’t have enough time and volunteer schedules are too inflexible
- I don’t have enough information and most volunteer roles aren’t interesting
- No one asked me to
For Charities it can be challenging to work with volunteers:
- Recuitment is time consuming
- Charities invest in training volunteers and then the volunteers stop before the charities see a return on their efforts
- Coordinating and managing volunteers on a skills based project can be more difficult than it's worth
We believe that creatively using technology and building a culture of universal volunteering we can create a situation where there is always the right volunteer for the right charity task. We believe we can support individuals, communities and organisations looking to make the world a better place to exist.
Give Your Skills Core Goals:
- To make it easy and fun for an individual to instantly start taking effective action to improve the wider public wealth and to make this process repeatable
- To create a global marketplace for charitable tasks - where charities post really great projects and tasks that they need done and there are so many volunteers on GYS that we can find exactly the right volunteer for the task. From a volunteers perspective they get really meaningful volunteer opportunities that challenge them without over-burdening them.
- To use the GYS platform/membership to support ethical businesses - fairtrade, fairpaid, co-operatives etc. To spotlight to our membership entities that are genuinely doing things better than their peers, in terms of outcomes for staff, customers, society and the environment.