The Opportunity

Social Impact Organisations house a wealth of knowledge across of multitude of subjects from childhood development to job readiness training to agriculture. These organisations work tirelessly to improve the lives of those they can reach, most often with limited human and financial resources. However, their reach is limited by these constraints. In order to touch more people with their essential work, these organisations need to expand and mobilise their networks by making use of volunteers and active citizens. However, for many, the time and effort spent training, managing and overseeing volunteers and active citizens is overwhelming and prohibitive.

The Solution

Hours 2 Impact is a digital training platform that disseminates the invaluable knowledge contained within social impact organisations to far-reaching audiences through curated, simple, fun, online courses. Hours 2 Impact helps these organisations have a social impact in communities and households beyond their existing networks, thereby scaling their social footprint and benefitting countless more people. A percentage of every course sold on Hours 2 Impact goes to the social impact organisation, enabling them to use their intellectual property to generate a much-needed income.

The Hours 2 Impact platform works with organisations to curate unique, comprehensive online courses to teach anyone how to create the particular social impact the organisation strives for, both for themselves and for their communities. These courses can be targeted at any active citizen who wants to learn about the work of the organisation or crafted especially for volunteers.

The Hours 2 Impact online volunteer training programmes transform the hours that people are already volunteering into hours spent making a real impact. This platform equips volunteers with the skills they need to meet the most pressing needs of the organisation, without requiring the organisation to spend valuable time teaching the volunteers how to help.

How It Works

Volunteers can be trained remotely, at a time and location that is convenient for them. The Platform will not only train the volunteers but will also test them to ensure that they have understood and internalised the training completely. Each course can be as comprehensive or as simple as the organisation feels they need.

The Facts

The newly released CAF World Giving Index 2017 rated South Africa as the 24th most charitable country in the world. South Africans were particularly charitable in the categories of ‘helping a stranger’ and ‘volunteering time’. The 2014 Stats SA Volunteer Activities Survey recorded 2.2 million volunteers resulting in approximately 610 million volunteer hours valued at R9.8 Billion.

South Africans want to contribute to building a more equitable and fair society. They want to make a positive contribution. And for more than 2 million South Africans, they do that by volunteering their time. Hours 2 Impact enables organisations to upskill their volunteers for maximum impact, before they arrive on site.

Our Pilot Project

This Platform aims to address some of the most robust and widespread social challenges that face South African society. Food Security and access to nutrition is a problem for so many people that it was a natural place to start. In order to address this challenge Hours 2 Impact worked with Reel Gardening to create a volunteer vegetable gardening training programme. The pilots have wielded wonderful results.

Volunteers utilized their new skills both to create their own vegetable gardens and help others in their communities to do the same. They found the programme comprehensive but still easy to follow. By digitizing the training, volunteers could access the platform whenever they had free time.

Reel Gardening has not only been able to engage their volunteers and cement their relationship with this network, but they have been able to achieve their aim of getting as many people growing food as they can reach. With mobilized active citizens volunteering their time, Reel Gardening has the potential for a much larger social impact footprint.