The gap was never a shortage of people who wanted to help.
Opportunities live in too many places at once. A club announcement here, a group chat there, a flyer on a wall, an email thread three weeks old, a spreadsheet somebody has to remember to update.
Nobody is to blame for that. It is what happens when coordination falls to whoever has time that week. And it leaves a student with four questions that ought to be easy.
- What is happening near me, and when?
- What would I actually be doing?
- Is there still space, or was it full a week ago?
- Is this something I would be any good at?
Not knowing is enough to stop someone. They did not stop caring. The next step was unclear, and something else was clear.
So the first screen answers all four.
Everything on Discover is a real event an organizer posted, on the date they need people, with a count that drops as places go. You should never have to email somebody to find out whether an event is full.
What is happening
Open events, sorted by when they are, or by distance if you let your browser share your location. Tagged by the organizers who run them, so a park cleanup and a tutoring session do not look the same.
What you would do
What the work involves, how long it runs, where it is, what to bring. Nobody should show up to a surprise.
Whether there is room
A count of places left, worked out when you open the page, so you can see whether there is room before you apply. If you are on the waitlist and somebody who was accepted withdraws before the shift starts, the next person in line who can still take it is moved up automatically, without anybody having to ask.
Whether it suits you
That one is still yours to answer. The rest of it should not have been the hard part.
Twenty people want eight places. Somebody has to choose.
An organizer can accept, waitlist or reject applicants by hand, or let Auto Select run a weighted draw. Your weight comes mainly from your credited hours, and it runs the way you might not expect: the fewer hours you have, the better your chances. Whether you turned up to shifts you were accepted for moves it a little, never by more than a few percent. Nothing else about you changes your weight. The only people left out of the draw, and waitlisted instead, are those already accepted to a shift at the same time and those the organization running it has banned or limited to its members.
That is a choice about who volunteering is for. A student with two hundred hours does not get first refusal on the next twenty. Turning up for the first time is worth something.
Then the part no software does for you. You go.
A Saturday morning goes to a food drive instead of a screen. An afternoon goes to a park cleanup, a tutoring session, a shelter, a neighbour.
You are credited when the organizer confirms your attendance after the shift. Checking in at the door records that you arrived; it credits nothing, and you cannot type hours in yourself. You can also keep a private log of service you did somewhere else. It is never added to your credited hours, nobody else sees it on your profile, and it is not on your transcript.
The two are never added together into one number, on any screen.
Your hours are never stored as a total.
Every shift you are credited for is its own record: the event, the date and the hours. Anybody who looks at your total is watching it get added up from those records, right then.
A running number would have been faster to build and quicker to load. We do not keep one, because a student's record of what they did should never sit one bad edit away from being wrong. Every change to an attendance record is written to a permanent ledger, along with who made it. Once an organizer closes out an event's hours, no credited record on it can be changed by anyone.
Hours are a record, not a score.
Schools and programs require them tracked, so they are tracked. We try not to let the number become the reason anybody came.
Somebody stays up the night before making the sign-up sheet.
That person is usually a volunteer too, and the work is invisible until it does not get done. Taking it off their plate is one of the more useful things software like this can do.
- One place your events live
- People find them and apply without going through you first.
- A roster that stays current
- Who applied, who you accepted, how many places are left, and who actually arrived.
- Fewer messages to write
- People apply and hear back in the app. If you change an event's place, title, description or closing date, everyone you have accepted gets a notification, unless they have turned event notifications off, and none of it goes through your inbox.
- A record you do not have to reconstruct
- Who checked in, recorded as they arrived, and the attendance you confirm afterwards.
Welly AI runs on your device, or it does not run.
Welly is the assistant inside the app. It finds an event for you, works out how many hours you have, or walks you through the details of an event you are organizing and creates it once you confirm.
The model runs in your browser, and nothing downloads until you open Welly and choose one. Not every device can run one; where the app knows a device cannot, it says so instead of offering it. If you never set it up, you download nothing beyond the app itself. With Welly AI on, the model that writes Welly's replies runs on your device. Looking something up, like your hours or events to join, is a request to WeVolunteer like the rest of the app, and a search sends the words you searched for.
Welly is a prototype for volunteering questions. It makes mistakes, so check anything that matters, and it never changes anything without your confirmation. Where it runs and what it downloads are set out in the AI and On-Device Processing Policy.
Most of the people here are somebody's kid.
Which changes what is allowed to be a default. If you are the adult who got sent this link, three answers.
A student decides who sees the details. School, grade and bio are hidden from students browsing profiles unless the student chooses to show them, and the organizer of an event a student applies to sees more, to run that event. Settings, under Privacy, shows what other members can see, and lets a student keep their service history and certificates to themselves.
The policies are written for the people agreeing to them. Students 13 or older, in grades 9 to 12, can join on their own; there is no parent or guardian approval step, and the policies say so plainly. They agree to the Terms of Service and the Community Guidelines and acknowledge the Privacy Policy, written to be read by the people agreeing to them, as plainly as we can make them. They say what is kept, for how long, and who to write to.
A safety report reaches a person. Software only sorts reports by the reason picked, and treats anything a student reports about an adult as urgent. No software closes a report, decides what happened, or acts on an account. The Youth Safety Guidelines describe what happens next. If someone is in danger now, call 911.