Sites Help Kids Start Volunteering
Many children are looking for ways to volunteer in their communities. Some are doing it in response to President Bush’s call to service. Others are trying to fulfill school requirements mandating service hours. But finding the right volunteer situation for a child can be challenging. Luckily, the Internet can help.
For some kids, the easiest way to volunteer is with friends or family. Kids Care Clubs (www.kidscare.org ), a non-profit organization, makes it easy to start a Kids Care club by providing free online registration, a startup handbook, compassion education materials, and project ideas. For teens looking to start a club at school, Do Something (www.dosomething.org) can help get the process started.
For families projects, head to the Points of Light Foundation’s FamilyCares project (http://pointsoflight.org/forvolunteer/family.cfm ).
Children who are new to volunteering may be inspired by stories about what other kids have done. Such stories can be found at "Organizations Started by Kids" (www.idealist.com/kt/youthorgs.html ) and “Kids Helping Their Communities” (http://users.safeaccess.com/olsen/service.html ). The latter also lists over 30 projects for kids to try. More project ideas are found at: “20 Ways for Teenagers to Help Other People by Volunteering” (www.bygpub.com/books/tg2rw/volunteer.htm ).
Some children find it easier to respond to requests by organizations in need of volunteers. Volunteer Match (www.volunteermatch.org ) and Idealist (www.idealist.org/kt/volunteercenter.html ), two large databases, allow children to enter their city or zip code to find organizations looking for children volunteers.
All software is judged on a five star scale by looking at the following five factors:
educational, fun, ease of use, value, technical.
Jinny Gudmundsen is the Editor of Computing With Kids magazine. If you have
questions or comments, please write to: .
© 2012 Computing With Kids
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