Volunteers
One benefit of living through a pandemic is that more opportunities have been developed globally for volunteering online. You’ll find that there is something for everyone these days and you don’t even need to leave the house to make a difference in the world! Please get in touch to tell us about your volunteering, and do share any new opportunities you discover so we can put them onto Stoicare.
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How Can I Get Involved?
Health and Care Roles
In the US you can volunteer as a mental health support worker through Crisis Text, if you have four hours a week you can commit to the service. You will get free training and support in this role. In the UK you can volunteer for a similar service, Shout, where you can start with as little as two hours a week, and again are provided with full training and support.
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As a person who is registered blind / severely sight impaired, I have to give shoutout to Be My Eyes. Its such a great idea! There is a free app, and then blind and visually impaired people connect with volunteers to get help with seeing things like instructions or labels, through using their phone camera. They have nearly 5 million volunteers!
Teaching and Language Roles
If you have specific skills like coding for example, there are some very exciting opportunities to change people’s lives through projects like Code Your Future in the UK or Code Club, a global organization aimed at children.
If you are specifically interested in fighting human rights abuses, you could try Amnesty Decoders. It is a really innovative project run by Amnesty International where you can work from your phone or computer to help work through photographs and documents. For example, they recently completed a big project where volunteers helped to track and analyse abusive messages sent to Indian female politicians.
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If you are more interested in teaching generally, there are loads of schemes where you can sign up to tutor children or refugees in a subject you are passionate about. For example in the UK there is The Access Project where you teach a disadvantaged pupil online for an hour a week in term time, or with refugees. In the US there are many opportunities to work with disadvantaged children, including supporting organisations targeting issues like child abuse and neglect.
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Alternatively you might be interested in helping people access reading materials who have difficulties due to visual impairment and dyslexia by creating audiobooks through Learning Ally.
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If you have a second language and are specifically interested in using your skills in this area, there are many online opportunities that specifically focus on this, for example Translators Without Borders.
Online Volunteer Portals
One of the biggest portals to online volunteering is through the United Nations. There are a huge range of opportunities you can volunteer for, everything from spending an hour designing a logo for a project, to translating documents to helping with grant proposals.
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There are also some more general large databases. In the UK the biggest is DoIt.Org, where you can search by online volunteering as one of the options and also search by the type of volunteering you are interested in and when you are available. In the US there is Do Something, which is aimed at young people and has lots of online volunteering opportunities.
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