Help From Home
Written by Debra & Mike Bright

The story behind ‘Help From Home‘ began a few years ago when I was doing a lot of volunteering activities from the comfort of my own home, like writing to sick children to make them smile, answering surveys from (mainly) psychological students and researchers, converting public domain books into e-books and raising money for charity for free by using click-to-donate sites etc, etc. I considered these as volunteering opportunities as I was spending my time helping somebody else, even though sometimes the recipient would not normally be considered to be the traditional type of person or organization one would think of as needing help.

Over time I realized I wanted to do more things that had the potential to benefit others and so I began looking for some more home based volunteering opportunities. The more I looked, the more I found, but the one over-riding feature I discovered about these opportunities was that for one reason or another they were just not featured on any of the volunteering portal websites like VolunteerMatch. Also, I realized that if you didn’t even know that such an opportunity existed (and there are some pretty obscure ones out there) there would be little chance in finding it. That’s when I realized that these type of opportunities really needed to be collated and put into one place, which I discovered hadn’t been done before.

I subsequently set up my website called ‘Help From Home‘ which I incidentally run on an altruistic basis, to feature Grassroot Initiatives that hopefully serve to inspire and encourage people to do things that help others, from the comfort of their own home. I figured that the type of opportunities that would appeal most to the person-in-the street would be the ones that would have minimal impact on their finances and time. Therefore the criteria for a volunteer opportunity that best represented this ethos would be ones which had to be easy to perform; involve no ongoing commitment (you could dip in and dip out whenever you wanted); cost nothing or very little to complete; take no more than 30 minutes to accomplish and if possible, be capable of actually being done whilst still dressed in your pyjamas!

Since December 2008, when ‘Help From Home’ went live, over 450 home based volunteering opportunities have been added to the site with literally hundreds more waiting in the wings to be vetted and potentially included on the website. I find it quite exciting to think that collectively, if people were able to volunteer their time in small amounts from their own home, the potential to make such a difference to the goals and aims of initiatives out there attempting to make this world a better place to live in, is huge.

I’m hoping that my website contributes in some small way to making this happen and I’d like to believe that with the opportunities listed on ‘Help From Home’, the world really can be changed – dressed just in your pyjamas!

Thank you Debra for letting me know about your initiative. It’s amazing how many opportunities are available out there that people can get involved with, even in their PJ’s.

Mari-Lyn Harris