There are many causes around the world that could use help. From individual people suffering, to whole communities, and even causes that threaten the future of humanity itself. In addition to help from charities, many of these problems could benefit from help by the average person. In my search to have a positive impact on humanity, I found out it's very hard to know how to provide help, and where your skills and knowledge might be most useful. I think many people are like me in that regard, they want to help, they're willing to, but they don't know how or where to start other than just donating spare money, which many people don't have.
We as humans have made it incredibly simple to communicate instantly around the world, and to buy products from countries we’ve never been to having them arrive on our doorstep in days. Yet it’s still incredibly hard to know how, if, or where you can help someone in need using your existing skills and your spare time.
I think many more people want to help than actually do. I think we should find a way to use modern connectivity and technology to solve this, making it easy for anyone to use their skills to help improve the world.
Humans are a helpful bunch when connected at a social level. We seem to have an inbuilt desire to help others if we can. This comes all the way up from our genes. I think the problem we have is lack of information. If we could use the skills we already have - with less focus on donating money - I think a lot more people would help. For example you could spend just 1 hour per week working on something you’re passionate about, and know that you’re having a positive impact on the world. With this approach, it doesn’t cost you anything, and if we can connect you with the exact projects where your skill set can be effective in helping, then the impact will be even greater. You don't have to dedicated your life to working for a charity, you can continue to do anything you like, just dedicating a small amount of time to help. If many people do this, we can provide a significant amount of help with no need for donations.
This specific recognition and opportunity to help with a tangible problem, makes providing help far more approachable for the average person. It's the difference between a problem being in the distance and out of your control, and someone specifically saying to you "Hey I know you're good at _______, are you able to help for an hour so we can achieve _______?" This narrowing down of how you can help, makes it easier for you to decide "Okay yes, I can help that day so I will." it simplifies the whole process to make it easier for people to actually help.
What about charities? This project does not aim to replace all charities, the aim is to provide more help than is currently available, to help people and also help existing charities doing great things. This project provides a new way for anyone to help, that doesn’t need to involve donating money to a charity. People can help on a collaborative human to human level. This project can work independently of charities, but also be enhanced by working alongside the world’s best charities to provide them with better access to people and resources through modern connectivity and technology.
So why don’t we just stick with charities? During my search to have a positive impact on the world, I came across a still-shocking realization that many charities use money irresponsibly and exist largely to make a profit for their operators and not to benefit those in need. Finding this out and looking at things like the lists of worst performing charities was a moment of shock for my younger self, and somewhat still is for me now. It was hard to believe that some charities were donating less than 1% of their money to directly helping the cause they were supposedly fighting for. Charities changed for me at that time. They changed in my young mind from being pure altruistic collectives that I looked up to, to being a mix of good and bad requiring careful analysis before donation. I could no longer look up to all charities the way I once did. This frustration has led me to this idea that I think could be the best solution to helping people more effectively, which includes helping the many great charities excel at what they do best. It’s about finding the most effective way to help, and connecting the problem with people that have the skills to solve it.
I honestly believe this could change the world, and I really hope it does. If it works, together we could help countless people at a global scale, and hopefully change our fundamental human culture to be one that is even better at helping and supporting others without needing to be paid in money. But this is not “my” project, I am setting this up to be “our” project. No one will earn money from it, and every single thing it does will be up for debate with the community. It’s a project for the people and by the people. It’s our project, for helping one another, and requesting help when we need it.
Charities work in a pretty simple way as far as the average person is concerned. They are given money by people, and with that money they help other people. The charity uses that money to pay for other people (employees, contractors, etc) to use their skills, knowledge, and resources to solve a problem. This can work well in some cases because the charities role is to know where to most effectively spend that money to create the most change, and in many cases there are amazing charities doing this really well. But as mentioned, in many other cases that money isn't used well at all, which is an absolute waste and incredibly disheartening. Not every person can donate money either. There are far more people with spare time than spare money, and at the moment if you want to help people and only have spare time, it's quite hard.
From a charity perspective, money “buys” skills, time, and resources to help fix problems. But being primarily money-oriented makes donating something that seems only possible for wealthy people with “money to spare”. This roadblock reduces the amount of people who will help any cause, and shifts the focus towards money and away from what’s actually needed to fix the problem, which is skills, resources, and time.
What if many of the skills and solutions didn’t need to be bought, but could instead be donated/contributed? People could donate their time and skills to help solve problems. Skipping the "needing money" aspect and also gathering a much larger group of people willing to help, who may have previously thought they were not wealthy enough to help. This is where I see a more effective way of solving problems throughout our communities and worldwide. It will enable more problems to be solved, more people to be involved in helping, and leave less money to be lost in the middle ground. In addition to this, by using modern technology to increase the level of direct communication between the people needing help and the people that can provide it, there is less room for error and less room for manipulation of information by media.
The purpose of this is not to replace charities, it's to work alongside them towards the same goals, ultimately resulting in more help being provided.
I think having a constantly accessible place to see the world’s problems and help solve them would inspire far more people to actually help, especially if they are given all the information they need to contribute effectively in their spare time. A domino effect of people helping people helping people.
What if as well as good charities, we had another way of helping people. A way more suited to the interconnected world we now live in. This is something I think together we should work on. An ever growing community of people willing to help others when they can.
AnyoneCanHelp uses the strength and flexibility of crowd-sourcing to help solve problems by connecting many different people. By going to the website and entering in what you’re good at, AnyoneCanHelp can match you with projects around the world that you can help with. Everything from simple local community projects, to complex global projects. It does this by categorizing projects to show them to people who have skills suited to help those projects. It then provides the framework for those people, no matter where they are or who they are, to communicate and collaborate effectively on projects of all sizes.
You can decide what you would like to help with, and how much time you would like to spend helping, it’s completely up to you. Whenever you want to, you’ll have a place to use your skills to help people and a place to directly request help if you need it, from all of humanity.
The ultimate goal of AnyoneCanHelp is to create a global network of people willing and able to help each other without needing to exchange money. To create a united community of people using their spare time to improve the world they live in.
You can directly request help, and can also submit projects in areas you think need help, starting your own projects that other people around the world can help with. AnyoneCanHelp enables problems to be submitted and detailed at their source, by people like you, unfiltered and real. Generating more accurate information and than the media and therefore more accurate and effective solutions based on direct information.
AnyoneCanHelp aims to bridge the gap between problems and the people who have the skills to help solve them. To provide the framework for a network of people and problems, so that solutions can be found with collaborative communication. It gives people who want to help people a tangible and easy way to do so.
There is a remote hospital which has no road access to it. This hospital needs a certain amount of medicine XYZ to treat patients. Without this medicine, 10 people in this region die per month. Because the delivery is needed by plane, it is too expensive to be made regularly enough to save/help the amount of people who need the medicine.
With a conventional government or charity approach, we might look at building a new road. This for example might cost $100,000. Unfortunately for both the government and the charity, that cost is too much to commit, as they have other areas where the money is needed even more. They may have 10 people dying per month here, but elsewhere that may be 20 or 100 people per month, so they have to prioritise resources which is completely fair.
AnyoneCanHelp enables us to help further with a different approach. First, the project gets put online. This could be done by anyone at all, it could be a family member of one of the sick patients, it could be a nurse at the hospital, or simply a caring local - all they need is an internet connection or text message.
Now that it’s online, anyone in the world can contribute ideas and resources to help solve the problem and accomplish the project. Anyone with relevant skills is automatically emailed and asked if they’d like to help. Other people can also find the problem by searching on AnyoneCanHelp.
Naturally, people start coming up with ideas and working together to find a solution.
From these ideas, and through collaborative communication, we find out there is a town 100km away which has ample supply of this medicine. There’s a clinic there that is happy to donate a supply each month near the end of their expiry date. This helps, but doesn’t completely solve the problem, as we need a way to deliver it. Through the communities contribution, we find there’s a flight path near the hospital for planes flying to another town 400km away.
After determining this, the community is then able to find a local private pilot who takes this route once a month to deliver supplies to the other town. This pilot is happy to go 20 minutes out of their way once a month, to drop supplies to the remote hospital. It’s only a small detour for the pilot, who is happy to do it knowing they are helping.
Lastly, because the clinic cannot get the drug to the airport, the community finds members in the local area who drive vans, and are happy to dedicate 1 hour of their time each month to deliver the clinics supplies to the airport hanger, ready for the pilot.
Overall, we have only a few people who are contributing a very small amount of their time and resources, however by communicating and collaborating effectively, together they are having a large positive impact.
A local food charity collects leftover food from local shops and redistributes it to people in need. In doing this, one of their biggest expenses is delivery, including the cost of the trucks, the high fuel cost, and the loading and unloading costs. With AnyoneCanHelp, we can potentially eliminate all these costs.
The charity has 5 main destinations to deliver its food, and normally their trucks take 100 boxes each and drive the route once a week. A member of the community looks at the traffic-flow to the 5 main destinations, and discovers that there are thousands of cars that take each route every week, so we should be able to find people to help who drive the same route already.
Then, some members of the community who drive this route already, offer to help by taking 1 box each of food. They are happy to add 15 minutes to their commute once a week knowing they are helping people in need. They pick up the box from the charity and drop it off at the location. It is easy for them, but it has a large positive impact on the charity when multiplied by many community members. This means the charity can now use their resources to help even more people. This is promoted around the local community, by a member who prints signs and places them around town. Soon we have over 500 local AnyoneCanHelp members who are willing to help by taking 1 box each.
After not long, there are enough volunteers to add up to the charity no longer needing the trucks to deliver the food. They can use this saved money to help more people in need.
The system we have created is reliable because it has so many people, if one person cannot deliver a box one week, they can tell the community and find another person to. Or another member may have space for two boxes and can take the extra load. Each member is helping just one small part but overall they are having a large effective impact on people in need.
A hurricane has devastated a city, people are being evacuated and saved from floods and dangerous winds, but the chaos and bad weather makes it very hard for local authorities to move around the city and determine the worst affected areas. This is put onto AnyoneCanHelp and members throughout the area are asked to take a photo with their phone of the current situation in their area. Using the power of crowd-sourced help from other locations, these photos are then sorted by members of the community around the world. Because so many community members can help, the sorting process is extremely fast. Members classify each photo on a scale of 1 to 10, then these classifications are double checked by other members to ensure they are contextually accurate. Within minutes, we have a map of the worst affected areas and photos of them, all of which can be given to the authorities to dispatch help, and to more community members in the area who can help with their skills as well.
A community member has noticed that in their town it will soon be one of the coldest nights of the year, and many homeless people may be suffering. They post the problem to AnyoneCanHelp, which connects people in the local area together who might be willing to help. It notifies them of the problem, and the opportunity to donate any spare blankets they have. Because the network can automatically connect and notify these people, a far bigger donation can be organised than if an individual person was just asking their friends. Through connecting local people, families, and businesses, a large donation can be organised, and people without blankets that want to help can also donate their time using their car to help deliver the blankets. AnyoneCanHelp has then brought more people together, to have a larger positive impact than we would have had otherwise.
The platform will be web-based and also downloadable. Access to the internet already covers more than half of the world’s population, and this access is growing rapidly with new projects aiming to bring more of the world online. The database will remain categorised and completely downloadable at any time, so it can also be distributed and read in printed form or on USB by anyone in the world.
The platform will ask people to submit problems that need to be solved, and also to pledge their time and/or resources they are willing to contribute. The problems can be local or global, simple or complex. The pledges can be from individuals or organisations, and can be for their time (for example 1 hour per week), their skills (for example being able to translate certain languages, or being a nurse), and their resources (for example water filters or engineering resources from a company’s employees).
These problems will be made accessible to anyone, so they can see and read more about them. This raises awareness of the problems, and makes it easy for people to manually find something they want to help with by them searching through the website. The problems will be categorised in multiple ways, including the scale of their expected impact, the expected difficulty of solving them, and the location they apply to. We aim to make it as easy as possible for people to find problems they are passionate about helping with, and then find out how they can use their existing skills or resources to contribute effectively.
The platform will also automatically match pledges to problems, by emailing the person who has pledged their skills and showing them problems that suit the skills they have pledged. They don’t have to help with the problems they are presented with if they don’t want to, but this system will help solutions to problems to be found faster and more effectively.
The platform will continue to be run and supported by collaborative help, and will never need to be “owned” by any company or individual. It will truly be a platform for helping people that’s run by the people.
AnyoneCanHelp is not just for collaboration between individual people, it's for collaboration between every part of human society, including businesses. By submitting the resources they are willing to contribute, businesses can be matched with the areas their resources can best help. Businesses can contribute products and/or employee time. For example they can give away imperfect products to people in need instead of throwing them away. They can also give incentives for team members to dedicate 1 hour of their time once a week to helping on projects. This can help improve employee moral, and overall company culture and productivity. It can be a great way to give back that is tailored to the resources a business is able to contribute easily.
People can help by spending half an hour translating a problem into a new language for more people to read, or they can dedicate multiple hours a week to solving specific global problems. How much they help is completely up to them, and scalable to suit their availability and capability. People with all skill levels and backgrounds can easily find a way to contribute and know they are having a positive impact on the world.
Whether it’s removing plastic from a local waterway, or removing it from the entire ocean, AnyoneCanHelp provides the platform to communicate and solve the problem together, and as a community decide on what we think is the most important and most urgent areas to work on. Whether it’s local community members collaborating, or scientists collaborating across borders, the tools and information to collaborate effectively will be available to them all.
AnyoneCanHelp makes it possible for problems to be added at their source, so we can get to the exact details and cause of the problem quickly, and make it easier to find an effective solution.
Because the platform is open for anyone to see and contribute, problems can be added directly at the source by people close to the problem. This prevents miscommunication by second hand accounts or by media, which may get the facts wrong and misrepresent the problem. Adding the problem directly is the best way to make sure the right parts of it are being worked on, and the solutions proposed will be as effective as possible.
You can filter problems by how big their impact will be on the world, how difficult they’ll be to solve, how local they are to you, and many more categories. AnyoneCanHelp makes it extremely easy to find problems you’re passionate about solving so you can find effective ways to contribute.
All problems are constantly reviewed by the community, including experts in each field which are approved by the community to help moderate. Experts donate their time in the same way everyone else does, and are able to find a method to use their expertise to help in their spare time. Whether it’s answering one question, or reviewing an entire set of problems relating to their field.
The whole platform is controlled and powered by the community, every part of the platform is contributed by community members, from the website design to the language translation of problems and the review of their importance. It’s our project, it’s built to help every person, and be helped by every person in their own way. There will be moderators elected by the community who are experts in their area of moderation. Protecting against any vandalism or misrepresentation of information. Everything on the platform will always be up for debate and discussion, all decisions made on the basis of logic and provable information.
The projects can also be used by educational institutions as assignments and classwork. Instead of working on imaginary problems, real world problems can be used in their place at universities and schools. Imagine if every time an assignment was done it had a measurable positive impact on the rest of the world, because the assignment actually had a tangible real world impact.This also gives more meaning to each assignment, helping inspire more passion in the students working on them to ultimately educate them better at the same time.
Example: Local waterways in a town are littered with plastic. This plastic is flowing into the local beaches and an initiative is needed to clean it up. Unfortunately, the local government does not have the money to accomplish this, so they have left it as is. A local university/college has seen this problem on the platform, and categorised the waterways into assignments for the students. Each waterway is unique and will need a unique solution to solve its pollution problem. By presenting the students with a real-world problem, they are more inspired to do the work. They each work on solutions for their unique waterways and are marked on their work as if it were a standard assignment. The assignments that the students present then provide implementable ways to solve the problem in each waterway. With this new information, more community members and students can spring into action to help solve the problem now they have tangible ways to do so. Finishing the work that the students started with their assignments.
To provide further incentive for contribution, people and companies can have profiles that list the problems they have worked on and are currently working on so they can be recognised for their contributions.
Example: A group of 5 people from 5 different countries are using their expertise to solve a problem in one country. They are designing a solar powered fresh water filter and plumbing system to be installed into homes in several remote villages. Once finished with the design, the team need to travel to each remote village to assemble and implement it. An AnyoneCanHelp member who is an executive at an airline is able to organise a donation of flights for each member to get there. 3 manufacturers in another country have come together and donated the supplies and materials to produce enough filters for the installation. Then a courier company have offered to deliver the supplies from the manufacturers location. This has involved both individuals donating their time, and companies donating their resources. Each one only donates only a small amount, but the overall effect is a large positive impact, all powered by better communication and understanding of what’s needed to solve the problem.
When charities or similar organisations need quick brainstorming to solve a problem, AnyoneCanHelp can send out a bulk email and text message asking people for ideas. This combines many brains at once to brainstorm ideas to solve a problem quickly. This can help quickly generate a solution to problems that may have taken longer to solve without all the community ideas. This can help small charities prioritise their resources by using the power of crowd-sourced ideas which people are happy to provide them knowing they are helping.
With a large passionate community of people willing to help, the opportunities are endless. Knowledge sharing, bulk information gathering and analysis, things like this could be accomplished easily by sourcing help from the large community. 10 minutes of each members time could save weeks of time doing things a traditional way.
Example 1: A scientific study conducted in Tokyo has been written in Japanese, but it is expected that the information in the study may provide large opportunities globally. The study is 500 pages long, so translating would normally take a long time. Instead, 1000 members of the community that speak both Japanese & English just spend 10 minutes of their time translating an assigned page of the study, and at the same time review a different already translated page for error correction. The whole thing can be translated in minutes, and is then translated from English into multiple other languages in the same method. This means the information can be distributed faster and more effectively so solutions can be discovered sooner.
Example 2: There has been a bushfire close to a city in Australia, there are large amounts of smoke in city streets, but the chaos makes it very hard for local authorities to move around the city and determine the worst affected areas. Community members throughout the area are asked to take a photo with their phone of the current situation in their location, these photos are then sorted by more members of the community. It takes 5 minutes to take the photo, and 1 minute to classify it on a scale of 1 to 10. Within minutes, we have a map of the worst affected areas and photos to be reviewed by the authorities to dispatch help.
I believe a platform like this represents the most effective way to continually create a better future for all of humanity. A better future for you, your family, your friends, and everyone you know. A better future for all humans as a whole. An ongoing opportunity to make effective positive change throughout the world. There's nothing better than waking up everyday with hope that the future is positive.