Improve Your Volunteer Experience
By Jess Guberman, PhD
Catchafire’s mission is to improve the quality of the volunteer experience by providing pro bono opportunities for skilled professionals. Catchafire’s vision is 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.
Catchafire believes in providing efficient, effective and meaningful volunteer experiences for both skilled professionals and the organizations with whom they work. They believe that a great pro bono experience can transform someone’s life and also know that a bad one can turn someone away from giving their time forever.
Rachael Chong, CEO and founder of Catchafire, was a successful young investment banker looking to give back to her community in a meaningful way. One day, her firm offered a volunteer opportunity to help build a house in the Bronx. As Rachael’s 5’2″ frame slowly hauled lumber across the schoolyard, she realized that she wasn’t volunteering in the most effective way. So, she spent the next six months looking for a better way to volunteer her time. Rachael was shocked at the lack of opportunities to volunteer her hard-earned skills and expertise. Frustrated by her inability to serve the greater good while juggling a demanding career, Rachael left the corporate world for the nonprofit one.
Recently at Google’s NYC office, Catchafire, in honor of National Volunteer Week, hosted a cross-disciplinary salon to explore the economic and social impact of the volunteer sector. Pro bono service can help build better businesses, nonprofits, social enterprises, careers and communities. Thought leaders from across the for-profit, nonprofit and academic spaces examined the following issues:
- How we can measure the value of pro bono in economic terms, and why it is critical to the growth of the public and private sectors that we do so;
- How the value of pro bono service and skills-based volunteering measure up economically to more traditional forms of volunteering;
- How and why companies and cities should create incentives for employee pro bono and volunteering programs;
- How the social role of service is changing, and what’s next.
Panelists for this event included Diahann Billings-Burford, the nation’s first municipal chief service officer and head of NYC Service; Ali Marano, vice president, Technology for Social Good at JPMorgan Chase; Susan M. Chambre, professor of sociology and research editor at the Center for Nonprofit Management and Strategy at Baruch College; and Rachael Chong, founder and CEO of Catchafire — a scalable online pro bono service platform. The event was moderated by Shelly Banjo, reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
This event was part of Catchafire Conversations, an ongoing series of dialogues exploring the impact of volunteering, service and giving, and featuring thought leaders from across a spectrum of industries.
About Author
Jess Guberman is a nonprofit executive and freelance writer for 17 years. She has focused her writing on the nonprofit sector of business and has been featured in print and online publications across the country.
