HandsOn San Diego (HOSD) is a nonprofit organization that serves as a one-stop hub for volunteers seeking meaningful opportunities, while providing guidance to nonprofits looking to build or expand their volunteer programs. Since 2013 HOSD has been empowering individuals and organizations to collaborate, building a stronger, more resilient San Diego—one act of service at a time. Last year we connected 10,636 volunteers to 108 different organizations throughout San Diego County.
As the executive director of HandsOn San Diego and someone who has been involved in Rotary for 17 years in numerous roles, I see a lot of opportunity for collaboration and mutual success between the two organizations. We’ve already collaborated with at least 7 Rotary clubs and 3 Rotaract clubs. Here are a few key ways your club can get involved with HOSD:
Become a nonprofit partner to post your volunteer opportunities on our website. Our site is one of the first results on search engines for volunteer opportunities in San Diego, so if someone knows they want to volunteer, but don’t necessarily know about Rotary, they could find your event. Our volunteer opportunity calendar is the most popular page on our website with an average of 580 views per day. This could expose your club to service minded community members who would be excited to learn about a group they could volunteer with on a regular basis. Last year over 60% of our active volunteers were 18-35 so our demographics align with many club’s goals of recruiting younger members.
Use our volunteer opportunity calendar to find projects for your club that work for your members’ location, schedule, and interests. Rotary clubs can sign up for our site as a team. With your Community Service Chair as the Team Captain, they can register multiple members for an opportunity on their behalf. Our site automatically tracks volunteers’ and their team’s service hours, so they are captured for when you input them in the Rotary Service Project Center.
Sponsor one of our VolunBEERS events. VolunBEERS is a fundraiser that we host at a brewery and attendees craft and/or pack donations for a local nonprofit or school. Past projects have included making no-sew pillows for safe parking lot participants through Dreams for Change, bookmarks and pencil pouches for Encanto Elementary, and making dog toys for local dog rescues. It’s a great way to put your club in front of an audience of people interested in having fun while giving back (which has been my experience at many Rotary events).
HOSD is an affiliate of the Points of Light Global Network, which includes more than 120 volunteer-mobilizing organizations located in 32 countries around the world. Points of Light aims to create a cross-sector coalition for a national volunteer movement to double the number of worldwide volunteers by 2035.
Rotary launched me onto this career trajectory, so I’d love to weave Rotary more into the community of non-profits and volunteers we have been building at HandsOn San Diego. I joined the Interact club at Grossmont High School sponsored by La Mesa Rotary and felt empowered to make the change I wanted to see in my community through simple projects like picking up trash at Lake Murray. Then attending RYLA changed everything for me. For the first time I saw myself as a leader. At RYLA I learned that I could continue with Rotary by joining Rotaract in college.
I served as co-president of the Rotaract Club of Santa Cruz County for 2 years while attending UC Santa Cruz. At this point volunteering became so ingrained in my life that I felt like I was missing something when I would return home during the summer. I started interning full-time with Outside the Lens, a media arts nonprofit that had an AmeriCorps serving as their volunteer coordinator. There I started to realize the work I enjoyed so much leading my Rotaract club could be a career path managing volunteers for nonprofit organizations.
After graduating and returning to San Diego, I joined AmeriCorps and was placed at HandsOn San Diego. Ten years later, I now serve as the organization’s executive director and have had the pleasure of being a member of Pacific Beach Rotaract and now Mission Valley Evening Rotary. I love telling this story to emphasize the value of investing in Rotary’s youth programs.
You can reach me at jessie@handsonsandiego.org to discuss opportunities to collaborate or club presentations.