Source: JTA
The website, 23hrs.com, built by two New Community Jewish High School seniors, matches teens with community service opportunities based on their location, skills and interests. The site also tracks the number of hours that the teens volunteer and sends the data to their school for recording purposes. To make the experience more social, the site also has photo sharing and tagging features.
The website, built by Edan Evenhaim, 17, and his best friend and classmate, Noah Emanuel, has matched approximately 150 students with 28 community service opportunities. Evenhaim anticipates that by the end of the academic year, students at several additional Los Angeles-area Jewish day schools will be using the site to find community service opportunities, log their hours and share photos with friends.
With the help of his father, Shawn Evenhaim, chairman of the Israeli American Council, Edan raised the $50,000 needed to build the site. Evenhaim has been working out the bugs on the site, which is still in its “pilot stage,” while recruiting his fellow students to sign up.
About 23hours:
23hrs is an organization that wants to better the world that we live in through community service. This organization derived from the idea that volunteering was too complicated. Our own experiences and feedback from our peers confirmed that the complications of volunteering was the main reason that repelled high school students from volunteering at community service opportunities. We wanted to take the initiative and create a more simple way of volunteering. We wanted volunteering to be possible at just a click of a button. We wanted teenagers to be able to volunteer at opportunities that interested them and fit their individual abilities. Together we choose the idea of creating a simple and efficient website that would increase youth volunteering throughout the world. With 23hrs, complications in volunteering is no longer an excuse to avoid giving back to the world and those less fortunate.
Read more at JTA.