Will a Court or School Accept Coyote
Helps Volunteering Hours?
Note: Coyote Helps does not yet exist as a
nonprofit. All of the information on this web site is PROPOSED.
Please see the home page for more information about this idea
for a nonprofit.
There is no way to guarantee a court, a probation officer or a
school will accept the volunteering hours you give via Coyote Helps
as a part of your obligation to them.
It's a sad reality that there are some really unscrupulous
"nonprofits" out there that make this promise, and charge people a
hefty fee as a part of their "volunteering." The founder of Coyote
Helps has regularly heard from people who paid a fee to a
"nonprofit" in return for a certificate saying they had done a
certain number of hours (the more hours needed, the higher the fee),
and when the person took this documentation to the court or their
probation officer or the person at their school that certifies
required community service hours, the documentation was rejected.
The founder of
Coyote Helps first discovered such a "nonprofit" in 2011, and
blogged
about it here. Eventually, a state attorney general drove that
"nonprofit" out of business, but now there are at least a dozen
"nonprofits" with a similar business model: they charge people who
need community service for a court or school for a certificate that
says they did a certain number of hours, and give the people
meaningless, unverifiable "volunteering tasks" like reading essays
and writing reflections on them.
Because of these "nonprofits", many courts and schools refuse to
accept ANY online volunteering whatsoever.
The only way to know if a court or school will accept your volunteer
hours with Coyote Helps is for you, the person that wants to
volunteer, to ask a representative of that court or school. Do this
BEFORE you start volunteering with Coyote Helps if that's the
primary reason you want to volunteer with us.
Some things your probation officer, court contact or school
representative should know about our organization: