Virtual Volunteering for High Schoolers
How to boost your community service during COVID-19
The college application season is at its height right now, and tens of thousands of applicants are trying to come up with a viable list of extracurriculars- including volunteering experience. However, with a deadly global pandemic in full force, it might seem like an impossible task to serve your community without risking your life, or the lives of those around you.
That is why we came up with a list of online volunteering ideas (divided into separate categories) that will be both safe and helpful for society, aside from being madly beneficial for your application form!
Literature
Bookshare
Bookshare is an amazing platform that helps people with dyslexia, blindness, cerebral palsy, and other reading barriers to customize their experience of reading books and find literature for school, work, or simply for recreational purposes.
If you are interested in contributing to this organization, then you can volunteer to proofread the content that is offered to the users of Bookshare. This is an educational experience beneficial for you and those who need your help.
Project Gutenberg
This website is a library of over 60000 eBooks, and its collection is getting even larger every day! A community within Project Gutenberg called “Distributed Proofreaders” welcomes new volunteers to take on the role of becoming the main source of eBooks on the website. According to Project Gutenberg, registered volunteers can proofread and “smooth read” pre-released eBooks to check for errors, manage projects, provide content, and even help improve their website.
LibriVox
LibriVox is another free public-domain resource of books with a great variety of the world’s most favorite works of literature. This non-profit, ad-free project offers audiobooks to the public, with all the books narrated by volunteers. Simply choose a book of your liking (that is not being subject to copyright) and record yourself reading the book using a computer, a microphone, your voice, and some free time. LibriVox will then release the finished audio files back into the net for free. No experience or audition is required-just you and your enthusiasm!
Coding
Mozilla
Want to gain some experience in a widely known organization? The main objective of the Mozilla Foundation, as a non-profit, is to create a safe online environment accessible to all. If you find this close to your own ideology and are great at coding, then you might want to contribute to their codebase.
Aside from a great array of miscellaneous project development opportunities, there are also other volunteering positions, like Mozilla content translation and individual or event organization.
freeCodeCamp
freeCodeCamp is another non-profit organization that helps its users to learn how to code by building projects. There are already thousands of contributors- and counting- within its community; become a vital asset to their team today!
Mostly, volunteers help expand and improve the organization by contributing to the freeCodeCamp curriculum, codebase, and their main source projects. However, there are plenty of other jobs that you could occupy, including the creation of articles, videos, and podcasts, helping people on their forums, chat rooms, and translating the content of the website.
Translation
Tarjimly
If you are proficient in a foreign language, are interested in helping refugees, and enjoy connecting with people, then this position might be perfect for you.
Tarjimly’s “humanitarians” consult refugees, asylees, and immigrants, who are referred to as “beneficiaries”. The company provides both parties with an application that they can access at any moment in time. A beneficiary is then connected to a humanitarian via live chat, where they can ask for translation or interpretation of any kind of information.
Translators without Borders
Translators without Borders is, perhaps, the most well-known non-profit community of all translators. You can translate texts of any sort and topics, as well as participate in engaging projects available to suit all interests.
However, if you find yourself unable or unwilling to participate in the process of translating, there are also other positions in project managing, graphic or web page design, and fundraising.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy is a great resource for educational material known to almost any student around the globe thanks to its support of over 60 languages. But did you know that the people who worked on all the translated content are volunteers?
If you want to help those like you proficiently comprehend the offered K-12 topics, then you might want to consider joining the team of translators; all you need to do is to fill out a form and wait for a response from the language team.
Human Rights & Care
Family eldercare/ Lifetime connections without walls
The feeling most of us are experiencing during the time of Covid-19 is loneliness; however, elderly people are probably the ones receiving the least amount of human interaction in these tough times.
Join the team of volunteers of this organization to show your love and support for our seniors by organizing classes and activities to make their days a little brighter.
The Trevor Project
Those who wish to aid the LGBTQ+ community might find The Trevor Project an ideal match for their next community service opportunity. The organization recruits passionate volunteers to work for crisis intervention services. They ensure a safe and secure connection for LGBTQ+ youth to reach out. To become a crisis counselor, you will be trained to answer calls and text messages from those struggling with their LGBTQ+ identity, coming out, and suicidal thoughts.
The Trevor Project only recruits people who are 18 years old at the time of application and can commit to a 3-hour shift for at least a year. Keep in mind that this position requires your utmost responsibility and care.
Best Buddies
Best Buddies is the world’s biggest organization dedicated to ending the social, economic, and physical discrimination against people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). The organization helps those individuals to form meaningful relationships with their peers through a plethora of projects connected with integrated employment, leadership development, and independent living.
The Best Buddies Friendship program also provides a safe place online to create one-on-one relationships via e-Buddies. After officially becoming an e-Buddy, you can start providing virtual support for those who need it most.
History
Citizen Archivist
If you are a bit of a history buff, we have a great volunteering opportunity for you! National Archives offer quite a few online community services that you can do at any point of the day, from the comfort of your own home. You can contribute to the catalog by tagging, transcribing, and adding comments to the records. This makes valuable historical documents more accessible and searchable for the general public.
Smithsonian
There are thousands of on-site voluntary works that are conducted for the benefit of the Smithsonian Institute. However, nowadays, they also provide online alternatives for their prospective volunteers, one of them being transcription of historic documents. These documents consist of diaries and working papers of prominent Americans, records of Smithsonian’s vast scientific collections, and more. If you want to unlock the mysteries of history’s most primordial or most recent events, then become a citizen scholar and start contributing today!
Miscellaneous
UN provides volunteering prospects in many different fields and areas of study. Their website harbors community service projects ranging from art and design to COVID-19 response, to teaching and training. If you did not have the chance to find something that suits you from some of the choices above, you will definitely discover fascinating projects among the variety of UN volunteer activities.
Zooniverse
Zooniverse is an exciting platform for people-powered research. Anyone who contributes to the research on Zooniverse is automatically considered a volunteer. To start a research project, you do not need any background, expertise, or hands-on experience; the platform makes it easy for you to dive deep into the subject of your interest and answer simple questions to contribute to the general understanding of the world and its components.
With no time restrictions, you can work on as much or as little as you would like. To get started, find a project that attracts you the most and start your research. The wide variety of topics that you may want to explore makes this one of the most unique volunteering experiences of them all.
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