Comment by qeorge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qeorge | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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