Finalist category: Digital Volunteer Award 2020
T4GMarcSloan
Digital Volunteer Award, Winner, 2020
Marc Sloan has created code4covid, a community of technologists to help not for profits with their tech needs. It now has over 1500 volunteers from all over the world who have been matched to over 200 projects, including charities such as Mencap and Crisis.
To begin with, it was a Google Form which brought you to me, and I used my tech experience to help as best as I could.
It didn’t take long for the number of requests for help to become overwhelming…I was soon getting requests for developers, managers and designers and more. Demanding bigger commitments than solving standalone problems. And increasingly, charities and non-profits trying to take their services online and not knowing where to start. So I started to build a community of technologists like me who wanted to help and called it code4covid. What set this group of people apart was that it was filled with highly skilled individuals: developers, designers, marketers, project managers, entrepreneurs.
With their help, we now have over 1500 volunteers from all over the world which we’ve successfully matched to over 200 projects.
For instance, we put together a team of web developers to help Crisis build a ‘free webstore’ for homeless shelters in 1 week. One of our designers helped Mencap design an accessible directory for local disability support services. An amazing product manager led a team that prevented Afyah from closing down and raised funding so that it could continue to support underprivileged women. We believe that through the efforts of our community, we will have indirectly impacted thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of the most vulnerable people during the crisis. You can read more about our story and the Digital Home Front here https://blog.marcsloan.ai/rise-of-the-voluntrepreneur-covid-19s-digital-home-front-heroes/
