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Welcome to the Skills-Based-Volunteering-Public wiki!

FAQ

What is skills-based volunteering?

We define skills-based volunteering as opportunities where volunteers can help provide solutions to complex business and technical problems for social sector organizations (including the United Nations and NGOs) that are solving the world's biggest social issues. Skills based volunteering can help you hone and perfect a skill, help provide capacity to impactful social organizations, and assist organizations accomplish their mission in making the world a better place.

Who can participate in a Skills Based Volunteering project?

All employees are welcome to volunteer!

Please note - Contractors are welcome to volunteer and the volunteering hours are non-billable.

What type of projects can I get involved in?

Currently, all projects will be virtual. Project work can range from development, consulting and strategic planning. We aim to leverage volunteer's skillset to make a social impact.

At this time, projects will help with issues in public health & COVID-19, racial equity and climate change.

Why do I need to attend a webinar before I can volunteer?

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We designed the webinars as required training for all volunteers. Webinars are important to level-set expectations and realities of tech for the social sector. For example, many of our partner orgs are building technologies for users in low income and low resource settings. Our partner orgs often have more constraints on funding their work, must be less risk averse and have stricter requirements than we do at GitHub. Topic webinars are designed to call out important issues in building tech for certain social causes or use cases.

What are project and ask maturity levels? Why does the maturity level matter?

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Maturity levels refer to whether a project or ask has been implemented in the partner org before and how much room a volunteer may have in informing design or implementation decisions. It's important for both volunteers and partner orgs to have a common understanding of maturity level, as it will determine what soft skills and frame of reference a volunteer should have to fulfill the task well. For example, low maturity projects or asks may require a volunteer help a partner org brainstorm a new idea, while higher maturity asks may require the volunteer complete a list of set tasks.

These are the maturity levels we use:

• Concept - Hasn’t been implemented at this organization in this form. Needs to be thought through and designed.
• Pilot - First attempt to implement. Initial design done, lot of room to improve
• Established - On the second, third, etc. implementation. Limited room to make changes.
• Maintenance - Important to keep project running. No new changes.

How do volunteer request for Manager acknowledgement before joining a project?

The Social Impact team can help connect with any interested volunteer and their Managers to provide information on what the volunteering project is, number of hours of volunteering and how this project will help their team.

How do Managers provide acknowledgement for team members that want to join a project?

The Social Impact team will connect with any interested volunteer and their Managers to provide information on what the volunteering project is, number of hours of volunteering and how this project will help their team.

Partner Organizations Requirements to join Skills-Based Volunteering

The Skills-Based Volunteering program works with a wide range of social sector organizations. We define social sector as any organization - nonprofit or for-profit - that positively contributes to or advances social good causes. To be a part of our Skills-Based Volunteering program, we ask the partner organization meet the following basic criteria:

• Primarily work focus relates to or helps achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. This includes US domestic-facing organizations working on criminal justice reform, fair housing, and racial equity.
• Currently have the capacity to engage with at least one volunteer for 20 hours over a six month period.
• Have a problem that can be scoped into one or more clearly defined tech or tech-adjacent projects (we help with the scoping!).

Examples of organizations types we can partner with:

• (International) Non-Governmental Orgs (I/NGOs)
• Nonprofits - e.g. orgs with US tax code 501(c) status or its equivalent in other countries
• B-corporations
• Other for-profit social sector companies Check out profiles of existing partners to see which orgs are currently involved.