Sparked

In high school we had a certain number of community service hours we had to complete each year. I'm not exactly sure what happened if you didn't complete them but I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have been able to graduate or maybe not even have moved on to the next grade level. What I do know is that I had lots of fun completing my service hours and have fond memories volunteering with my friends.

After I left high school I always tried to keep volunteering in my life. I was part of a service club in college and volunteered whenever friends suggested an opportunity. Recently however I have fallen out of the habit. What with our move across the country, our house hunt and purchase, the impending packing and moving, I haven't quite gotten myself organized to volunteer here in Vermont. Thankfully I came across this website called Sparked. Maybe I'm late to the game or maybe, like me, you have never heard of Sparked before. Either way I wanted to write about it because I am really enjoying it.

Sparked is a microvolunteering website. In their words microvolunteering is "volunteering that you can do in small bits of time - from 5 minutes to 2 hours. It's high-impact, high-efficiency do-gooding." Basically you go to sparked.com, set up an account that includes your interests and your skills and then you have access to a list of challenges for which you can volunteer. You choose what you want to do, you choose how long you work on it and that's it! For example I just worked on challenge that was typing subtitles for a YouTube video on Suicide and the Media for an organization in New Zealand.

I think it's a really neat idea and it fits really well into my schedule. I can pick it up or put it down whenever I need to. Plus they have challenges for all sorts of skills and interests so I won't always be working on the same thing. Hopefully this will satisfy my need to volunteer until I can search out other opportunities in my neighborhood.