Jayne Blog on volunteerism/volunteering, nonprofits, ngos, aid & development, women's empowerment, communications & random thoughts

community service & YahooAnswers

05:53, 13 December 2007

.. Posted in Volunteerism and Volunteer Management


.. Link

I've been participating in YahooAnswers, a free-for-all online forum where anyone can ask a question and anyone can answer it. As far as I can tell, it's used mostly by teenagers in the USA. I've been sticking with just one forum: community service (Home > Society & Culture > Community Service). It hasn't taken long to become one of the top five answerers on the Community Service forum, based on points earned from my answers (both the act of answering and community members voting my answers as the best). Sadly, the same questions are being asked over and over and over:

• "where can I volunteer in my city/county?"
• "how can I volunteer overseas?"
• "how can I raise funds for such-and-such cause?" and
• "how do I know if a charity/nonprofit is legitimate?"
• questions about the Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity

I rarely get to answer anything beyond this, in relation to community service. There's no frequently-asked-questions-and-their-answers section on the forum and no effort to build knowledge -- it's just the same questions over and over again. There's also a lot of desperate questions, such as those related to needing service hours BY TOMORROW. What I've learned from using this community:

• moderated online discussions with minimum standards for membership and posting are oh-so-much better than unmoderated free-for-alls
• any online community or forum should have an easily accessible and frequently-promoted frequently-asked-questions-and-their-answers section
• most teens and college students in the USA have NO concept of the costs around their participating in overseas service activities (security, transportation, supervision, etc.)
• most teens in the USA think nonprofit organizations/charities should be staffed entirely by volunteers, that people who get paid to work for nonprofit organizations or charities are taking money away from clients, and that nonprofit organizations should get all administrative items covered through in-kind donations (the electric company donating the cost of the electricity bill, a company donating office space and furniture, Xerox should donate copy machines and service, etc.) and never use financial donations for such.

In short... it's been an insightful but rather frustrating experience, and I think that, by the end of the year, I will have abandoned it. Would be nice if all the many organizations promoting teen volunteering would answer these questions, even for a while; it would give them quite an insight into how well their outreach efforts are working.