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June 22, 2009

National Conference on Volunteering and Service
Details of New Online Volunteer Project Announced

As the Obama administration today kicked off its United We Serve campaign to encourage Americans to volunteer over the summer, a group of technology and nonprofit leaders formally announced details of All for Good, a new online application that aggregates volunteer opportunities from organizations across the country.

The announcement, made at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service in San Francisco, named the people who will serve on the board of a new nonprofit group, Our Good Works, that will govern the project that has been dubbed a “Craigslist for service.” They include representatives of technology companies like Google and FanFeeder, social-networking groups like Facebook and LinkedIn, and nonprofit volunteering organizations like Idealist and Network for Good.

All for Good, which is hosted by Google and developed by volunteers from organizations including the Craigslist Foundation and YouTube, is running the administration’s volunteer Web site, Serve.gov., which is operated by the Corporation for National and Community Service.

“By bringing together amazing service opportunities from existing volunteer organizations, we hope to amplify their efforts and share ways to do good across the Web,” Paul Rademacher, a software engineer at Google who helped guide the project, said in a statement.

The All for Good announcement also highlighted the way some organizations are already using the project’s open-source technology, which is available to other developers.

YouTube, for example, has created “Video Volunteers” to link nonprofit groups with skilled video makers who can help them publicize their causes, using an All for Good widget on youtube.com/videovolunteers. MTV, the television network, has developed Serve.MTV.com to help bring All for Good opportunities to young people and has prepared two public service announcements to promote it.

All for Good announced that Jonathan Greenblatt, a faculty member at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, is president of Our Good Works. Mr. Greenblatt has been working on the project since he served as a member of a group that advised the Obama administration during the transition.

Two nonprofit groups that originally were reluctant to participate in the project, VoluteerMatch and Truist, have joined the project after negotiating new terms with All for Good. (See The Chronicle‘s coverage of the genesis of All for Good and of the way VolunteerMatch resolved a difference it had with All for Good over licensing.)

— Suzanne Perry

Monday June 22, 2009 | Permalink

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