The United Nations Online Volunteeering Service announced just a week ago the winners of the “Online Volunteers of the Year” award for 2005.
Besides the prize itself, these events are interesting because they help to promote online volunteering and give real examples of what’s going on and what one can do volunteering through the Internet: translators, website management, fundrising, information and news reasearch, reporting on proceedings, team coordination, etc.
And also to remark not the results or the goals achived, but also how this was done. A couple of examples:
- One of the winners is, in fact, a four people team belonging to Australia, Pakistan, USA and India working in Syria. This kind of networking is just one of the things OV is about.
- Another winner is also a mother and son team, but the point here is that he’s got cerebral palsy and spastic quadriplegia and is using a wheelchair, he simply cannot “just” go to Zambia and volunteer on-site. As an online volunteer, he found himself actively involved in a development project that he had not imagined before to ever be able to be part of. And this is also one of the other things online volunteering can do: bring back people excluded from volunteering because of different reasons.
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