United We Serve: AllForGood.org: the spirit of working together

Today, President Obama called on each of us to serve, to get involved in our communities, to work with each other as part of the summer of service initiative at serve.gov. The people at craiglist and the craigslist foundation are totally supportive of the President's vision. Personally, it's a really big deal for me to help support the people who serve and continue to help anyone who wants to help others.

There are a lot of folks these days who simply want to get involved, and volunteer. Service is more than just volunteering -- it's contributing to the overall good of your community and nation -- like helping out at your local homeless shelter or organizing a neighborhood garage sale to benefit the community center.

AllforGood.org makes it easy to for all Americans to engage in service in a way that fits whatever volunteer capacity someone has -- anytime and anywhere. Everyone has something to contribute to their communities -- and All for Good enables people to impact their community in the way that's easiest and most meaningful to them. No matter how you choose to focus your service, we can all do something and when we unite to serve, together we can achieve more than ever before.

(Yes, this is the "craigslist for service" thing.)

You can find service opportunities right now at the site. For example, the volunteers' area located in the community section of every craigslist city site is now one of several partners providing a feed to the All for Good website. Tell your friends, in person, Twitter, Facebook whatever you prefer,  and do something.

If you want to learn more about how you can get involved via All For Good, we just added a new session with Jonathan Greenblatt at this Saturday's Volunteer Boot Camp at UC Berkeley. Still time to join us and see people like Jonathan, Arianna Huffington, and Randi Zuckerberg, and some nerd named Craig speak about how to use social networking to do good. You can register at the door or on-line at http://www.craigslistfoundation.org/bootcamp.html

Follow Craig Newmark on Twitter: www.twitter.com/craignewmark

Comments

[Eli Davidson - Huffpost Blogger]

Dear Craig,
I just wrote a HP column focusing on the good WE can create together. Why people focus on the down side of something that is intended for the greater good is beyond me. My intention is to Share The Good!

Kansas, Iran: Harvesting A Better World. Hope you will check it out!

Eli

[Aerik]

Eli,
In case your comment was referring to mine, I'm not saying AllForGood is a bad thing - I'm pointing out that it's not all that new and providing some ideas for how we can do *even better*. So, other than a tiny bit of frustration, I don't intend to be negative at all - my intention is to try to contribute by pointing out the fact that we can (and should) change the way we're thinking about this, to make a much bigger impact.

Frankly, I think the people behind AllForGood are probably exactly the right folks to work on this - I'd encourage them to think a little farther outside the box with what they're doing, and really change the landscape.

Aerik

P.S. I've laid this idea out in more detail (than is appropriate to post here) at eventfeed dot org.

[Missmeg]

I completely agree with Aerick. There were so many groups that were left out of All for Good. One main group is local Volunteer Centers that may be using something besides Volunteermatch to list their opportunities. These are organizations that are working in their communities to connect people looking to volunteer with organizations that are seeking volunteers. They already use web databases to list opportunities, but now, if they didn't list with the websites that are being pulled together for All for Good, they are left out. It's redundant to list opportunities in all of these different places. Their needs to be a comprehensive website that pulls from all sources in order to be most effective.

[Aerik]

More resources to find volunteer opportunities is fine, and I'm glad to see a resource that pulls data from many volunteer organizations, but until all the data (the volunteer opportunities) is syndicated so that anyone can aggregate it, we are going to continue to have little slios of information... creating more websites does not solve the problem, but freeing the data improves things.

In other words, each website will only have a subset of all the possible data, and the best way to improve this problem is for volunteer organizations to adopt a standard way of publishing their data (like RSS) so that it can be easily shared and picked up by anyone. Then, it will be very easy to search *most* of the volunteer opportunities from *most* of the search/aggregator websites.

Aerik