onHand is an award winning volunteer matching solution. IBM describes us as an “Uber for Volunteering”. Our mission is to create exactly that: Uber for volunteering on a national scale – providing an on-demand way for vetted volunteers to give help, whilst making it fast and safe for people and organisations to receive help. Operating in limited areas today, our solution has the ability to capture the huge rise in social good to come out of the Covid pandemic and harness that good for all our futures and across the UK.
Today, onHand matches vetted volunteers with older adults and vulnerable people who need help with simple tasks such as shopping, medicine collection/drop offs, urgent errands and other essentials. By tapping into the sharing economy we can address one of society’s most pressing issues, at a time when NHS resources are most strained. Prior to Covid, onHand’s volunteer matching platform had established itself as a disruptor to the care industry, using tech to simplify the way volunteers and older adults connect. The response to our platform has been applauded by various industry experts such as the National Innovation Centre for Ageing and across the media.
Our concept has been tested and proven in London by thousands of users including by the London Boroughs of Hammersmith & Fulham and Lambeth, who commissioned onHand to help their residents in light of the Covid outbreak to great success and we have now begun pilots in further cities.
As an innovative yet small team, onHand needs investment to scale. Funding would allow us to invest in our technology and replicate our successes across the UK. This development will take us from helping 1000’s of vulnerable older adults in limited areas to helping 100’s of 1000’s across the country. The social connections we make on a daily basis are life changing for those we support. This includes care-givers in need of a break or additional and simple everyday help. We help many with living well and addressing loneliness, with many reports of alleviating signs of depression in those isolated.
Our project delivers systems innovation, using tech to find and automate matching of volunteers with people in need. The onHand app already has the ability to vet and track volunteers and allows volunteers to instantly claim shopping refunds, payment of which are then automated back to the volunteer. No other app has this level of functionality built in, proven and easily activated. As a result, the number of onHand volunteers has grown by 250%+ since the start of 2020 and the number of people requesting help has more than doubled. But there is more we can do.
We want onHand to grow beyond the limited areas we are now live in, providing a rapid solution to help address social isolation needs (only increased by Covid). We will help relieve the NHS, reducing the volumes of vulnerable people being admitted into hospital unnecessarily – because they have no support – and we will also help those being discharged from hospital. In a post Covid world, onHand will resume providing a larger variety of tasks for older people who need help, including closer contact and in home support such as light gardening, simple tasks around the house (like changing light-bulbs and taking the bins out) and basic companionship, all with a network of new volunteers who continue to give their time even after Covid. These are the types of services we successfully provided prior to the current crisis – delivering multiple 1000’s of hours of help in the last year. NHS Social Prescribers, Age UK and British Red Cross hospital discharge teams are among some of the charities we currently have trusted relationships with.
We hugely admire the NHS Responder App. It was, however, adapted from a Cardiac Arrest app and was not designed for large volume volunteer matching. It has some tremendous assets in volunteer supply (750k sign ups) and access to demand supply from the NHS itself. However, the NHS Responder App has frequently reported urgent needs for more volunteers. This supports our view that the volume of need is so great that both services can co-exist at scale. Further, the NHS Responder App’s future purpose is to support greater needs within the NHS. Our approach to engaging Corporate employees offers a solution to the large gaps in volunteer supply.
Whilst there are incumbent organisations providing Corporate Volunteering programmes, we know of none that are able to enable local and safe opportunities, solving for remote, shift, seasonal and office based employees. With onHand, volunteering is kept close to the employees location and so works for remote or office teams. Opportunities are “micro”, meaning they fit into any schedule, making onHand an option for shift and seasonal workers (groups overlooked by traditional corporate volunteering solutions). As many organisations are struggling to engage remote teams, we help keep employees physically active and doing good, with measurable impact on engagement and well-being. The CEO of Newcastle Building Society publicly stated that onHand is “the future of corporate volunteering” based on the systemic change in remote working seen in 2020. With Deloitte reporting that 77% of employees believe volunteering is “essential to employee wellbeing” and that 80% of millennials (now the largest group in the workforce) intend on taking positive action in their local communities, we are well placed to capture the rise of civil good.
Since January 2020, we have delivered over £80,000 worth of food, equating to ~45,000 meals (based on ONS data) and spent over 2 months on befriending calls (when adding all our calls together). In February we tested a new area, adding Youth Mentoring opportunities to our app for the first time. Within just a few weeks we were on track to schedule over 500 Youth Mentoring sessions. We want to be the on-demand volunteering solution for the UK and in 2021 we will add volunteering opportunities across Homlessness and Sustainability. We need your help to go faster and cause greater impact.
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