After about 3 months of working on the Urban Survival Project concept, I realised that to really improve opportunities for excluded young people, there needs to be a social and technical infrastructure in place. This involves
- First, creating a flexible available and interconnected pool of literate urban volunteers
- Second, enabling them to connect with and help young people and any one else who needs it, by making it easy to share time and knowledge immediately and online
When I started to design this concept, I realised that these two needs extend to all forms of volunteering and social projects, so I began to work on something bigger than the original USP concept. “A social network that mobilises the Facebook generation." I called it iVolntr.org.
The main issue is that in today's culture the volunteer has to do much work even before they start doing something helpful. So I figured if we could create something that works with all the major social networks, and allows people to volunteer from home with lots of people being able to do little bits of bigger tasks, we'd remove the pressures of commitment and also the hurdle of traveling to places that are difficult to get to.
No one seems to be doing anything like this right now. There are lots of sites that enable people to form helpful communities, but none of them address the core issues that stop us from volunteering. Here's a quick snapshot of where the iVolntr concept therefore uniquely fits in the current landscape.
