The AU Student Government’s Community Service Coalition is the pilot collegiate organization to use the website myImpact.org, a platform that volunteers can use to log, track and share their community service, or “impact.”
Users can submit — either through the myImpact site or through Twitter — the quantity of hours volunteered, meals served, dollars raised or donated, trees planted or people mentored to their “myImpact journal,” according to co-founder and executive director Chris Golden, a 2010 School of Public Affairs alumnus.
Golden said that that the site has three major purposes: to engage young Americans in service, to demonstrate that service programs are effective in creating change and to advance the notion of “service as a solution” to local and national problems.
“We’re promoting the idea that online activity can drive offline action and vice versa, to get people engaged beyond just clicking ‘like’ to a Facebook page or signing a petition,” Golden said.
The site is currently in beta, meaning that Golden plans to make changes to it in the near future, including enabling users to submit service work through text messaging, and eventually, directly through their organizations’ official sites.
So far, 169 individuals and six organizations — including the CSC — have registered and posted, but the CSC is the first collegiate organization.
Stephen Bronskill, CSC director and a sophomore in SPA, said a benefit of the site is that users can quantify service in ways other than hours volunteered.
“Harnessing the tools of our generation is important,” Bronskill said. “We’re not so much into listening to the radio anymore. We’re online, we’re wired, we’re on Twitter and Facebook all the time. If we can use these tools for more than just Facebook gossip, thinking about helping and doing something that matters, that’s amazing.”
Though the site was officially launched in June, myImpact has been a long-term project for Golden and his co-founder Nick Troiano, a current Georgetown University student who previously attended AU.
The two met as college freshmen in 2008 at the ServiceNation Summit on Sept. 11 — the National Day of Service for young people. They then spent a year meeting with people in the service field and talking to them about their needs.
Two major themes emerged from these discussions, Golden said: the potential of social media in helping organizations reach their goals and the need for people to share their service experiences with others.
“It’s really important to provide some sort of greater context, a larger story to what it is that a volunteer is doing,” Golden said. “One of the things we came across was volunteers saying, ‘I’m volunteering every Saturday, but I don’t think this is making a difference. I don’t see how the work that I’m doing in this small organization is actually helping to solve that problem.’”
In October, Golden raised $800 in 24 hours of fundraising on Facebook, and the organization won $4,000 from a Chicago-based grant competition.
In February, myImpact received a $25,000 grant through the Pepsi Refresh Project, an online vote-based competition for people, businesses and non-profits that need funding for new ideas.
Today, Mobilize.org, a non-profit youth advocacy organization, provides fiscal support for myImpact. Golden works full-time as the myImpact executive director from their office on K Street NW. The myImpact staff includes three part-time interns, an independent Web developer based in New York and a board of directors.
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