A Growing Trend: Online Volunteering Is On The Rise

By Author: Kanchan Roy
Total Articles: 4
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When a terrible earth quake hit Haiti in 2010, a huge number of donations were made to restore the shaken and broken island in the Caribbean. But not only money did help to rebuild the country. In the wake of the earth quake, thousands of Haitians were missing and thousands of unidentified dead were found among the ruins. It was not money that helped identify the deaths and give clarity to their relatives. It was an online volunteering project.

Through the social business website sparked.com, hundreds of people from all over the world participated in the micro-volunteering project and compared photos of missed people with photos of found dead. Only by that way many families in Haiti came to know what happened to their missed relatives. All this could not have been achieved without the help of all the volunteers who spent some of their free time in front of their PC and used it to do some good instead of just playing around.

It must not always be an example as dramatic as identifying the dead. Online volunteering can have many faces. It can appear in all forms that you can think of. You can spend your whole day ...
... helping families with legal problems over the web or just spent five minutes a day finding out where there are opportunities to start micro-financed businesses in local areas. Sometimes it is only a tiny bit of information that keeps underprivileged people from starting a thriving business. With your access to the internet and your free time to give, you could be the link between these people and the modern world of all-surrounding information.

You can start contributing to NGOs all over the globe without the need to visit all these far away places yourself. So if you would like to help an organization that builds wells in Africa or that fights corruption in South America – it's no ten hour flight that you have to take anymore. It is only a click away on your computer.

And if you don't know what to do or how to help, you can get into contact with networking organisations like the Indian Navi-Mumbai-based NGO The Kanchan Foundation (TKF) that seeks to connect people who are willing to help to exactly those people who need their help the most. Through the online portal of TKF, online volunteering is made simple, and you can monitor your own contributions and success.

The approach has become a world-wide trend by now and numerous organizations work with the help of online volunteers. The United Nations, for example, have set up a successful online volunteering page as well and gather more and more volunteers every day.

So don't see your computer as a nasty working tool or a toy to play around with after work. See it as your key to social services that you can fit into your daily plan whenever and wherever you like. Use your smart phone or laptop to contribute to a better society during lunch breaks or for half an hour before you go to bed. And surely, you will find that it gives you more satisfaction than your last game of “Angry Birds”.

No matter the amount you are capable of donating, donation for child educationis a valuable cause and your contribution does matter. Volunteer in India and feel the difference especially at the grass roots levels where a simple smile is enough a reward for your efforts.