Volunteering is a great thing to do while you’re in college. It’s an opportunity to do good while building valuable skills and putting yourself to work doing something other than studying (which is really helpful when you start looking for a job). Obviously volunteering isn’t only for people who have time on their hands, yet many non-profit organizations treat it like it is. Why would you have a top notch software developer running around picking up trash when he or she could be fixing a few bugs on the organization’s website? Why have a brilliant investment banker building a house when he or she could be managing the organization’s endowment? If the volunteers want time away from work and would prefer to do something different, that’s totally cool. But what if they want to offer pro bono services? Where do they find organizations who can make the best use of their time? Catchafire is a New York, NY based B-Corp (a for-profit company with a social mission–we actually featured internships with B Corporation) that aims to fix this problem. They want to “make it easy for every professional to use their skills for good, and to make it easy for every nonprofit and social enterprise to access and effectively use pro bono as a way to build capacity within their organization.”
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