As of July 2019, Reddit ranks as the No. 5 most visited website in the USA and No. 13 in the world. Statistics suggest that 74% of Reddit users are male. Users tend to be significantly younger than other online communities like Facebook with less than 1% of users being 65 or over. Reddit is known in part for its passionate user base, which has been described as “offbeat, quirky, and anti-establishment”. I participate in Reddit because I have struggled at times to connect with young, male audiences, and to have a handle on what young people say regarding nonprofits, volunteering, civic engagement and other subjects of interest to me professionally. If you want to reach out to young people, especially men, in the USA, or even know what they might be thinking, Reddit is a terrific resource.
If you are interested in volunteerism or philanthropy, here are subreddits – online discussion groups on Reddit – you might be interested in visiting regularly, which I’ve dubbed, collectively, as “Reddit4Good”, though some are questionable in terms of ethics and quality of info (updated March 17, 2021):
- AmeriCorps
- CASA – Court Appointed Special Advocates
- Charity – for any post relating to charitable causes. Great place to post your calls for volunteers when your post gets deleted here on volunteers.
- community service
- CrowdsourcedActivism
- Doctors Without Borders
- ECAdvice: Extracurricular Advice (mostly for high school students)
- FundandDev – to discuss fundraising (also sometimes known as development in the USA)
- Global Development – development in the sense of help humans and protecting the environment
- GoFundMe
- helpit, “For volunteering, helping others, and generally being a good human being”
- Human Rights
- humanitarian
- Inclusion
- International Development – development in the sense of help humans and protecting the environment
- Museums.
- Nonprofit Projects
- Nonprofittech
- Peace Corps
- Philanthropy
- Red Cross
- Redditors Without Borders
- seizethegood – in association with a podcast
- TechSoup – highlights posts from the TechSoup forum, and information about events and other resources from TechSoup
- Thinktank – proposing solutions to problems big and small.
- United We Stand – “To engage in discussions about how to improve our current society through non-violent means of caring, sharing, loving, accepting, and helping one another.”
- Volunteer – Want to help a community or a cause? Want to share your volunteering service experiences or to share opportunities for others? Have questions on how best to recruit, engage & support volunteers? Want to discuss ethics around volunteerism? Come share, question and discuss. Note: this is a moderated subreddit with very strict rules for posting.
- volunteer2 “without stupid mods” A subreddit created by people who didn’t like that the main subreddit regarding volunteerism is moderated.
- VolunteerFreely “Post all your Volunteer opportunities or requests. we won’t filter you like the other community.” A subreddit created by people who didn’t like that the main subreddit regarding volunteerism is moderated.
- Volunteer Firefighters
- Volunteer Toronto
- Volunteer Vancouver
If you are in Utah and are looking for volunteering opportunities, you should follow UServeUtah.
If you want to get ideas for voluntourism – where you pay to “volunteer” abroad, where you get to have a “feel good” experience for just a few weeks or months (as opposed to having to have an area of expertise and local people designing the volunteer role, not a company that brings in foreign volunteers), where you don’t need to have any skills and no one checks your background – that’s not really doing anything “for good.” But I’ll share the places on Reddit where people post voluntourism opportunities (updated March 17, 2021):
Full disclosure: I’m the volunteer moderator of the Volunteer subreddit. Is it tough being a 50+ female moderator on an online community that skews oh-so-young and male? Yes. Yes, it is.
September 21, 2020 update: check out The Nonprofit & NGO Guide to Using Reddit, to see how your nonprofit, NGO, charity or other community program can leverage these and other subreddits to build awareness, promote events, recruit volunteers and more.
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