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Find a local organization that helps the homeless, and offer yourself as free IT help for a full day (or three).

You may not be an IT guy, but you are computer savvy. You'll be invaluable for jobs like:

    - cleaning crapware off computers
    - removing spyware/viruses and installing antivirus
    - fixing email issues
    - networking printers
    - answering questions about Excel, Word, and so forth

By helping this way, you'll improve the productivity of the organization drastically, which will have a real impact you can feel good about. Best off, your contribution will act as a multiplier, lasting well beyond the initial time you'll put in.

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If you're more able to giving money than time, please visit and consider donating to http://greensborohousingcoalition.com - this is a non-profit in Greensboro, NC, which does amazing work both in preventing homelessness and making sure that safe housing is available for low-income families.

My stepmother is the director of this organization, and I can speak to her and the GHC staff's incredible hard work and dedication. They manage to run at only a 15% overhead, which is truly incredible. Your money will have an impact here.

It seems like it'd be even better to have a central agency that multiple non-profits could turn to for this stuff, rather than each one needing their own IT guy (of varying skill) to do it for them individually. A Helper's Help Desk.

That would be very useful, but the point I'm making is that any help at all would go tremendously far.

I think we have a tendency to want to use our Special Talents to help people, when that's not always the most effective thing to do. For example, I prefer building websites for non-profits any day of the week to running anti-virus, but that's often not nearly as helpful as just upgrading everyone's copy of Internet Explorer and removing all the toolbars (speaking from first hand experience here; I've done both). Also, if you only have a day or two to offer, you need to be realistic about what you can finish. No one benefits from work half-done, and everything needs maintenance.

So instead of waiting for the perfect storm of Your Skills meets The Perfect Charity, just go down to the office of a charity you care about and offer to help with IT stuff. Its not glamorous, and you might not self-identify as an IT person, but you'll be more able to help than you might realize.

In Seattle we have http://www.501commons.org/ which sounds like what you're talking about.

While this has good sentiment, I feel like a lot of nonprofits and charities would rather you volunteer your physical support rather than get rid of malware, which nowadays a lot of people are capable of doing, and they might be apprehensive to let you go and change stuff in their computers if they have it laid out in some idiosyncratic way. But I think the best option would be to ask the nonprofit themselves, what the best way you could be helping is.

I have done this, and it is very helpful. Give it a try before you dismiss it!

You seriously won't believe what you'll find. For example, new laptops purchased from a big box have so much crap starting up that they make the laptop run poorly. It might seem obvious to you what programs should be uninstalled and easy for you to do it, but that's not true for other people.

Just email them and say you'd like to setup a chair in their office X day(s), all day, and anyone with any computer problems should come see you and you'll do your best to help, no job too small. I think you'll find your offer well received and useful, but there's certainly no harm in testing it out.

As a computer person, you're in a unique position to help and you can have a big impact. Don't dismiss this idea so easily!

I'm not dismissing it, I'm just saying I think the best thing would be to ask on a case per case basis, "what do you need most help with?" I see this as a sort of systemic problem with nonprofits and other causes nowadays -- sometimes the most obvious step (asking what they need) is neglected.

Volunteering as an IT support guy is still terrible ROI for most people here.

Volunteer work in general is mostly about spending some of your time to get a good feeling for yourself, and advertising the charities in question. Basically everyone who haves a profession of any kind gets the best ROI in charity for their time by working, and donating the money earned doing so. This is abstract and feels less like helping people, but if your purpose really is to help and not purchasing happiness for yourself, it's what you should do.

And they take my money to ... pay someone for IT support?

Homelessness is a complex problem but if you want to help that child, the second best bet is to help her parents. Help with whatever problems they have, help with overcoming racial bias, mental illness, drug addiction, poor cv, whatever.

The first best bet is of course to pay for her scholarship to a boarding school. which rather stuffs her baby sister. Complicated.

Money isn't always enough. Sometimes numbers of volunteers are needed more than money. Money doesn't buy help, it just buys getting some jobs done.

If this kind of 'mundane' computer tasks is really an issue for helping organizations then I'm gonna give a try, I've always been afraid of too had problems.

The founder of the company where I work started a "Turkey Trot" five years go to benefit a local food bank.

He took the time to set up a very simple website to register "runners" for the event ($25 is asked per person, but not everyone pays, obviously), and got the permission from the city to have a few police officers make sure participants weren't run over. Truth is, it is more of a community event almost like a parade, where some people wear turkey hats, dress up their dogs in costumes, and everyone has a little fun Thankgiving morning before everyone overeats later in the day. But if you want to run 5k you can. Most walk.

In any event, that first year a few hundred people attended. This year, it's estimated that over three thousand people participated. You can do the math for the ticket sales. Several of us volunteer our time to support this annual event now (I do the postcards & posters). This year we even received generous corporate sponsorships to further reduce overhead costs.

It's only once a year, so it isn't a huge time drain. But the impact is incredible and does help a lot of people in need. If almost every neighborhood could do this...

A lot of charities have serious problems building and maintaining websites, and will be very grateful for any help you can offer. I would recommend reaching out to them directly about this, since they often don't even know who to ask.

In my experience with a few charities whose websites I've been brought in to rescue, they're often left in disarray after they hired a well meaning but inexperienced developer who they were introduced to through personal connections. This works well initially, but becomes costly to maintain - both in terms of financial cost and managerial time spent overseeing the project.

If you can commit to either a monthly check-in to keep the website fresh, or to helping them build a more sustainable workflow so that they can easily update their own content, that could have a huge ROI for them in terms of fundraising, finding volunteers, and, perhaps most importantly, reaching the people who need their help.

As it relates to homelessness, many homeless people have access to the internet via a mobile device or library. For these people, an intuitive website can be the best way to connect with charities and receive their aid. Many charities still don't have responsive sites, so they're essentially cut off from reaching the mobile population. I think the ROI on that alone would be a great place to start.

Money. In comparison to volunteering you get very little out of it, but that makes it all the more charitable.

I assume you are some kind of fairly well paid professional -- work an extra three hours a week and donate the extra money to e.g. a food pantry. You will do them a lot more good than spending those same three hours doing unskilled labor for them.

This is good advice, but there is still the question of where to donate the money. Charities don't respond to market pressure the same way a firm selling goods or services does, so lots of charities exist that do middling or even negative value for their donated dollars.

Has GiveWell done evaluations of programs to end homelessness?

CharityNavigator (http://www.charitynavigator.org/) is a good resource for sorting out NPOs that manage their resources well from those that don't.

That seem to look at simple metrics which we don't necessarily want charities to optimize on. They are planning to work on measuring what really matters, results: http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&c...

Or ideally, both. Homelessness is such a fundamentally and universally misunderstood and stigmatized issue that it behooves everyone to educate themselves via first-hand contact.

The volunteering doesn't benefit the organization so much as it benefits oneself, and by extension society at large by removing one more potential spigot of hateful nonsense.

Givewell (http://www.givewell.org/) is focused on providing the best ROI. It doesn't necessarily fulfill the emotional aspect of personally volunteering and interacting with whom you are helping, but if your main concern is actually helping people, it's your best shot.

You could make a list of spare rooms among your freinds, or club together with freinds to rent some space, then give that for free or at negligible rent to people who need it.

If you do this you could also work with one of the homeless charities and explain what you are doing so that they can help provide support. Helping at a soup kitchen is admirable, however that doesn't solve the problem of needing somewhere secure, safe and stable to live.

There's an interesting organization called Year Up[1] - I have volunteered there and it was a great experience. I think a lot of people on HN could have a significant impact on students there.

http://yearup.org/

Acknowledge them. Start by saying hi and follow your heart after that. Many people don't even acknowledge homeless people as human beings.