How to volunteer while sitting right here at your computer
Besides being Martin Luther King Day, today is also a national day of service. It's a day on which Americans are being called upon to volunteer in their communities to try to make things better. Jacob Colker is the co-founder of an organization that offers ways to volunteer from your computer.
It’s a concept that Colker, and others at his organization Sparked.com, call “microvolunteering”. It’s not unlike microfinancing, says Colker. You take a lot of people with a little bit of spare time, you get someone contributing 30 minutes here, someone else pitches in 45 minutes there. But if it’s easy to do, more people will be able to do it and those small increments will add up.
The tasks Colker talks about are more white collar than your average Habitat For Humanity housebuilding project. It might be designing a logo for a charitable organization’s website or designing a marketing plan. A little bit of consulting. But Colker says he doesn’t see this as something to do instead of traditional time commitment volunteering, just something you could be doing for someone else in a short amount of time when you’re sitting at the computer.
Also in this show, Craig Finn is the lead singer of the popular rock band The Hold Steady. But he gets a lot of downtime on the road. He likes to fill it with the game Words With Friends.
