Pages

Friday, March 11, 2011

The concept of micro-volunteering gains momentum

Note: This is an older story from NPTtv.  Click here for the video.
A time may be approaching where the giving of time may be profoundly more important than the giving for money. In fact, many would argue that that has always been the case. The concept of micro-volunteering is gaining increasing strength. Donors are able to give minutes or even seconds, and the results that are yielded can often be astounding.


Empowering people for involvement

The First Aid Corp is utilizing crowd sourcing techniques to save lives. With the realization that the survival rate from sudden cardiac arrest is very low, First Aid Corps decided to join forces with an organization known as The Extraordinaries, a social business platform in San Francisco, to develop an online list relevant to what is known as a public automatic external defibrillator, also known as an AED. They have requested people around the world to send in pictures, location descriptions and GPS coordinates of AEDs, in order to create an online list of AEDs. Jacob Colker, CEO of The Extraordinaries, has stated that they have hundreds of billions of hours of spare time that just happens to come in 20 to 30 minute spurts.

Colker states that if there were more opportunities available for people to give of their time, as made possible by something like micro-volunteering, then maybe they will return. The focus is on creating as many platforms as possible to provide people with avenues to give of the time, for the betterment of humanity as a whole. As this notion continues to gather momentum on an increasingly global scale, the resultant positive impact on the world could be immeasurable. A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, and the business of changing the world begins with the first second.

No comments: