100,000 Volunteer Surplus
We met with Mayor Bloomberg's office this month at City Hall. They described the massive volunteer surplus the city is experiencing. 100,000 New Yorkers have responded to a combination of a brutal recession and Obama's call to service to create what is likely the largest human capital investment opportunity in the city's history.They are seeking advice on how to engage this tsunami of interest in service. In a city that has few funds to spare, engaging a football stadium full of people in meaningful service is...well...more than an overwhelming challenge.
This pool of talent represents a tremendous asset in human capital. There must be good ways to leverage these people to help us dig ourselves out of the recession and help those most in need.
We offered a few of ideas:
- For every New Yorker receiving some form of welfare, appoint them a personal board of directors. Many of us who grew in upper middle class homes have de facto personal boards of directors but for others they need access to people who can serve as mentors and connect them to the working world. Get them a lawyer (advocate in the legal system), marketing manager (coach on how to market themselves), HR manager (career coach), IT manager (tech mentor) and accountant (financial advisor) who can help them navigate their lives in this challenging time. Ask each member of their board to meet with them one-on-one and then occasionally as a team.
- Create a crowdsourcing website for the city. Have each department list 20 challenges they face that prevent them from achieving their goals. Invite all New Yorkers to post their ideas for how to address the solutions. Host an event to celebrate the best ideas and put them into action. This would enable all New Yorkers to serve without having to manage them directly.
- Challenge corporations to use the skills and talents of their employees to support the coming wave of nonprofit mergers that we are going to experience due to the recession. Create a city office to coordinate accountants, HR professionals, lawyers, marketing professionals, management consultants and others who are needed to help integrate existing agencies.
Those were the ideas we shared. What additional ideas do you have that we could pass on to the Mayor's office this week?
--> Much like uber-brands create "pop-up stores" for the holidays; (http://trendwatching.com/trends/POPUP_RETAIL.htm) we need pop-up mission-driven service-hubs. They would focus on tackling a specific problem that is ideally only in need of short-term help (paint a school, create an urban garden, etc.) and within a several block radius. No need to create new infrastructure and overhead...when the surplus is gone - so is the pop-up service hub.
--> Connect ngos in the city with Google Latitude or iPhone's Loopt program. These location based programs would allow people who wish to serve to set-up their "service parameters" and if they walk/bus near a ngo in need of help - their phone will notify them with a text message of the ngo,their given needs and how far (a block or so) the phone user is from the ngo.
I LOVE the idea of creating executive boards for all New Yorkers on public assistance, assuming families had the ability to opt-out. This would help avoid the obvious and justified charges of state paternalism.
Or another idea to add to the list: countries like Iceland (or is it Norway?) that have excess power generation capacity but no ability to transfer the power over AC lines into continental Europe have figured out how to export electricity in another way. They smelt steel, a very energy-intensive process, and export that product and all of its embodied energy. Why not apply the same principle to the overabundance of volunteers in NYC? Figure out something that with the value-added of volunteer hours becomes exportable to other places in the US or abroad, effectively packaging the generosity and creativity of New Yorkers and shipping it to a place with a dearth of volunteer manpower.
Great post Aaron. I really appreciate the idea of creating a crowdsourcing site for the city, but have a bit of a different take on it. What if you were to create a competition between each of the boroughs or neighborhoods, and have them identify the needs within their communities and then individuals could vote on which of the ideas were most important. Once the greatest needs were identified, residents could upload the specific talent/skills they could offer to address that need. This would create a different kind of volunteer matching system that doesn't just ask people to plug into an existing volunteer project, but really matches them where they would be able to best offer their expertise...hopefully creating a much more meaningful volunteer experience.
Also, building off of Ari's point above, it's worth taking a look at the mobile app that a new start up called the Extraordinaries is creating. More about that can be found here: http://www.theextraordinaries.org/about.html
As service providers grapple with budget constraints and limited resources, there has rarely been a more urgent moment to effectively utilize the skills, resources, and compassion of all Americans towards the social good.
I'd like to add a few thoughts to the set of innovative ideas outlined above:
- "Ride to Recovery" program: Plug-in to the NYC subway system to develop social service centers akin to CVS "minute clinics". During weekends and peak usage times, volunteers can offer access to financial literacy education, job training, and public benefits enrollment where New Yorkers commute each day.
- Apply the board of directors concept above to the institutional level. Identify non-profit service providers facing budgetary and human capital constraints and provide them additional advisory support partners.
- Mobilze corporations to offer employees direct deposit payroll contributions to "NYC Recovery and Support Fund" to be distributed to critical community service providers.
- Create non-profit "mutual fund" donation options, making it easy for people to support specific issues, such as education or unemployment.
Wow. What an opportunity. Thanks for the mention Kari. We'd LOVE to get involved with NYC. We're working on a handful of very powerful crowdsourcing apps that would allow new yorkers to volunteer on-the-spot and on-demand using their mobile phones. We can put them to work!
http://www.theextraordinaries.org/about.html
I just posted about this:
http://www.theextraordinaries.org/2009/02/100000-volunteer-surplus-in-nyc-call-us-.html
thanks.
-ben
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