We are a busy ass generation. The average student has at least 5 tabs open on a single Internet window while browsing… at least. Our attentions spans are getting smaller. Doing a close reading of a scholarly source is now as simple as CTRL+F, type in the word you are looking for. Terms like ‘micro-blogging’ are the norm and anything over 140 characters is considered an essay… or am I alone in all of this?
There’s nothing wrong with being busy, my mom always told me that the Devil finds work for idle hands (yes, in case you couldn’t guess my mother is a traditional Caribbean woman who insists that if I had a bad dream it’s because I didn’t pray the night before…) Despite how busy we all are as students it’s important to make time to give back. We’re all paying thousands of dollars to hone in on our skills, and those skills are exactly what it takes to help the community.
KoodoNation is “an online hub that connects volunteers with non-profits through microvolunteering”. You have the ability to help hundreds of organizations, for free, without ever leaving your home. One of the greatest perks, if the organization doesn’t interest you, you don’t have to feel guilty when passing them by… cough, cough ‘Because I am a Girl’ campaigners who practically live outside of Kerr Hall West.
The steps are this simple:
1. Login to KoodoNation.com
2. You can join a team that is already working towards collective goals.
*I’ve requested a Ryerson University group so look out for that in the upcoming days. Are we really going to let OCAD out do us?
The beautiful thing about KoodoNation is that signing up does not mean you’ve subscribed to their newsletter. Meaning you don’t have to shift through dozens of emails from fellow team members or charities everyday, you do everything on your own time.
3. Share your skills! Varying from Accounting to Twitter, KoodoNation allows you to help the community with your unique skill sets. This way engineering and ECE students can collaborate on the same team and collaborate on their expertise.
4. Volunteering your time can be quite useless if your not passionate about the cause, that’s why KoodoNation allows you to choose the causes that you actually give a damn about. Be it animals or veterans, they have all the bases covered. If you don’t see a cause that you’d like to volunteer your time for, you have the option of searching up and creating others.
5. Finally, the microvolunteering process. I know, I know, we’re in school to get jobs! We actually want to make money off of our skills not just give them away for free. The beautiful thing about KoodoNation is the fact that we never have to pull our asses out of our desk chairs. Microvolunteering is as simple as searching through questions that charities put forth and giving your input.
In the image below Kids Help phone asks “IDEAS?? We need an affordable/effective reward system for a youth volunteer program”.
The questions/challenges will be geared towards the skill sets and causes that you choose in steps 3 and 4.
That’s it.
