We built this because we needed it

Where this came from

Every high school student in Ontario needs 40 hours of community involvement before graduating. Between us, we have completed more than 600 hours.

Finding somewhere to volunteer was often harder than actually volunteering.

We would find an organization we really wanted to help, only to discover they were not accepting volunteers that month. Sometimes an opportunity was an hour away by bus. Other times it was during school hours, or the minimum age was 16 when we were 14.

We knew we could not be the only students dealing with this.

Before building Volunteer North York, we asked other students whether finding a place to volunteer was one of the biggest challenges they faced. More than 70% of the first 20 students we asked said yes. We know 20 students is a small sample, but it was enough for us to think the problem was worth trying to solve.

We asked people who knew more than we did

After spending months working on the platform, we started reaching out to professors and other people who could give us an outside perspective.

We were honestly not sure how many people would respond. We were just high school students asking people with much more experience to look at something we had built.

Some did.

Professor Marsha Chechik at the University of Toronto told us the idea was "extremely useful" and challenged us to think more seriously about things like scalability, privacy and security.

Professor Jeff Avery at the University of Waterloo went through the platform with us and raised questions we had not considered. One example was what happens if 200 students apply for an opportunity that only has two spots.

Another Waterloo professor asked us a question that changed how we handle organizations on the platform: students can use their school email to help show who they are, but how do we know an organization is legitimate?

We did not have a good answer at the time.

That is one of the reasons we now review organizations ourselves before they can post opportunities.

How we think about safety

Most students using Volunteer North York are between 14 and 18, so we take the organizations on the platform seriously.

Organizations cannot post opportunities until we have reviewed them. Registered charities provide their charity registration number. For other organizations, we look at things such as their website, address and contact information.

Organizations are also required to use two-step sign-in because they may receive contact information from students who apply to their opportunities.

We would rather take a little longer to review an organization than let something questionable onto the platform.

Get in touch

We are still early in this project, and we want to be upfront about that.

There is still a lot we want to improve and add. If you are a student, you may not find everything you are looking for yet. If you are an organization, we are happy to help set up your listing and make changes if something is not working for you.

If you run an organization and want to work with students, if you are a student and something is not working, or if you have an idea for how we can make Volunteer North York better, we would like to hear from you.

volunteernorthyorkbusiness@gmail.com

You can also send feedback through the feedback page inside the site. It comes directly to us.