Welcome! 🎉

Thank you for joining the Ways to Connect project. With your help, neighbors can more easily find volunteer opportunities, service clubs, mutual aid groups, and major events in their community. Your contributions make volunteering more accessible and help communities thrive.

What is Ways to Connect?

Every day, people ask the same question: “I want to help—but where do I start?”

Ways to Connect was created to help people find and access the volunteer platforms and resources already out there.

We don’t host opportunities ourselves. Instead, we guide individuals to the right volunteer platform for their area, helping them discover opportunities they might not otherwise find. From Asheville to Albuquerque and everywhere in between, Ways to Connect makes it easier to navigate toward trusted, local resources that connect volunteers with real community needs.

Your First Steps

We need your help to improve community pages. Here’s how to get started:

1. Explore Community Pages
Check out some great examples of community pages like Grand Rapids, MI or Las Vegas, NV.

This gives you a sense of how community pages look when multiple sections (i.e. Service Clubs, Mutual Aid) are filled out.

2. Assess Your Local Page
Find your community through our Explore page. Look for spots that need to be filled in—like service clubs, mutual aid groups, major events, or prominent organizations.

Not seeing your community or want some help finding a community page to help with? Reach out to [email protected].

3. Use the Contribution Guide

For each section on your community’s page, you will be able to make recommendations and improvements. Our Contribution Guide will walk you through each step!

The guide provides simple tips on how to research and submit updates, definitions, examples, and step-by-step instructions.

4. (Optional) Share Your Page
Once you’ve made updates, share your community’s page with friends, family, or classmates! You can use our Social Media Toolkit to make it easy.

5. Keep Going (If You’d Like)
Finished your page? Great! You can expand your impact by helping nearby communities, too.

Tracking Your Volunteer Hours

If you’re volunteering for school, service credit, or another program:

• 0.5 hour = for every completed & approved section of a community page.

• 0.5 hour = for promoting your page on social media (with prior approval; if completing service hours for school or court-ordered service, social media posts cannot account for more than 50% of your required hours).

Need verification? Reach out to [email protected]. Just give us 2 business days’ notice before your deadline.