Giving More Than Money

For liveblogged transcripts of this talk, see the MIT Center for Civic Media blog.

This page references the open panel from the Awesome Connect event. For notes from the internal discussion session on helping fellows with more than money, see the page on grantee support.

Jeremy Liu

Jeremy Liu works on professional skill matching in the Bay Area, and previously ran the East Bay Asian Development Corporation.

Deanna Zandt

Deanna is interested in the problem of handling volunteer labor in nonprofit organizations. She is also interested in advocacy and evangelism by the general public (for example, the Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood controversy).

Arlene Ducao

Arlene loves maps, and focuses on drawing connections between mapping and volunteerism. She is currently working on making infrared satellite imagery more accessible during disasters.

Emilie Dubois

Emilie is a PhD student at Boston College studying collaborative consumption, with a specific focus on time banking. She is interested in questions of social capital and peer-to-peer bartering.

Question and Answer

Barriers to volunteering

• Is there a barrier between low skill volunteers and super volunteers who might either push projects in a new direction or go rogue?
• People who don't have money don't necessarily have time either - was that an explicit design constraint for these projects?

As an example, Planned Parenthood had a great media and volunteership strategy that allowed women to participate and campaigns and initiate their own efforts, and people got really into it. The important thing is that you have to leverage existing community and have that built before you need it. Even within those communities there are sometimes issues with identifying the right people for a job. Time Banking and similar systems are great for identifying people with skills, but they still have to have time to give, which gets to be hard for people whose skills are in high demand. Part of the time issue is that we need to move away from focusing on "solving other peoples' problems" and more on building agency.

Gamification

• Has time banking been gamified?

Not currently, because it doesn't need it to be compelling. Analogous behavior already takes place within families and circles of friends; we should do a better job of supporting those efforts before thinking about gamification.

Disrupting the space

• These are all old questions; we've been talking about cooperation and social capital for years. Are we at a moment of disruption in this space?

We can be if we start rethinking this space and taking inspiration from other fields (for example, crowdsourcing). People are already starting to understand that traditional market economies are not a one-size-fits-all solution.