It has been a very busy year for us in iVolunteer Philippines! We’re so happy to see the continued growth of the organization – in the past year we were able to partner with over 30 organizations, with over 200 events, pulling in over 2000 volunteers and providing over 11,000 volunteer opportunities for our everyday Filipino heroes!
Here’s a rundown of the highlights for iVolunteer this past 2013:
- Volunteering Conferences and Exhibits – We were blessed this year to have various partners (NCEAV, VSO Bahaginan, Habitat for Humanity, Rappler) invite us to attend, participate and present in their conferences and exhibits. This allowed us to further expand our network, meet new friends and help promote volunteerism across the country!
- Halalan 2013 – The national elections in May gave us the opportunity to volunteer for good governance and clean elections through our partnership with Simbahang Lingkod ng Bayan for their Gabay Halalan Call Center, where we helped educate and inform voters about the election process.
- Project EDSA – Another interesting volunteer experience for us was Project EDSA, where we spent several weekends painting the Longest Peace Mural in the World! It was fun and inspiring to see people from all walks of life come together to produce a creative work that was the peace mural along Camp Aguinaldo.
- SEC Recognition – While more of a legal requirement rather than a major organizational triumph, our registration with the SEC this year helped formalize iVolunteer Philippines as a non-profit organization. This further enables us to take the organization forward in promoting volunteering across the country and reaching out to more Filipino volunteers!
- Disaster Relief Efforts – It saddened us to see thousands of Filipinos affected by multiple natural disasters this year, from various typhoons hitting different parts of the country, to the major 7.2 magnitude earthquake in Cebu and Bohol and finally, the worst of them all, super typhoon Yolanda which struck the Visayas region only last November. It was a delight however to be able to work with hundreds of volunteers and multiple partners in our different relief efforts – from repacking relief goods with the DSWD and Simbahang Lingkod ng Bayan, to welcoming Yolanda survivors with Operation Salubong at Villamor Air Base, and even empowering our online volunteers by working with Rappler to document names of survivors in Leyte!
- Opportunities to use technology for a good purpose – We were so happy to be given various opportunities to work with our friends in the technology sector to use our organization and our solutions to help volunteers and non-profit organizations. One instance was when Curiosity Design Research, with Foolproof Labs, hosted a usability workshop for us which we attended with our friends from Solus Interactive to further improve our website’s usability. Another instance was when we worked together with the Philippine Web Designers Organization in mentoring web designers during the first Caritakathon – Charity Hackathon! And how can we forget brainstorming with other tech minds at Hack for a Cause PH for Yolanda web apps. We look forward to further collaboration and improvement of our technology platform in the coming year!
- New Volunteers and Friends – The biggest highlight of the year for us was getting to meet and partner with all of you who volunteered and worked with us over the past year! We continue to grow stronger as the iVolunteer family grows, and getting to work and volunteer with so many people from so many different fields was such a treat!
That’s it for our year-end recap! We hope you enjoyed reminiscing with us on our highlights, and thanks again from the bottom of our hearts for all the support you’ve given us over the past year! We hope to see all this good work continued into the New Year! Happy Holidays! 🙂
iVolunteer Philippines 
Reblogged this on Heroes of Yolanda.