onHand - feel good eco and social action
by Startacus Admin
Making a difference: social good startup onHand and its innovative tool to help engage employees with on-demand volunteering and sustainability opportunities.
Volunteering is a good thing. Using your free time to help other people and make their lives a little bit better, taking some pressure off whatever organisation is in need of said volunteers. But if you don’t have anything specific in mind, how do you go about looking for places to volunteer? How do you know where your time will make the most difference? What if your employer was able to provide you with all of this information and help you to volunteer in the community?
London-based social good startup onHand has created a tool to help employers and employees alike with sustainability and volunteering opportunities, inevitably being dubbed the ‘Uber of volunteering’. This tool provides employees with all the volunteering opportunities that they could want in their area - even if they are working remotely - and covers a range of things, such as litter collection, doing some shopping for someone who can’t do it themselves, or youth mentoring and crisis response.
The employer can track CO2 savings, as well as their top volunteers and which departments are doing the most. This tracking does admittedly have the potential to blur the line between ‘voluntary’ and ‘mandatory’, but a good employer has the opportunity to do something positive and fun with it.
For every employee who volunteers, onHand will plant trees on the company’s behalf. One for every employee’s first ‘mission’, and every 10 missions after that. When these missions are as simple as ordering a takeaway, the startup says, that can be a lot of trees. These are planted in the highest impact areas around the world, such as Madagascar, Mozambique, and Haiti. Of course, this itself is a big help on multiple levels - from improving the global environment, to the local environment, to giving local people work.
In January, onHand announced that they had raised £3.2 million in a pre-Series A funding round led by 24Haymarket, with participation from Northstar Ventures, UKRI, and Shazam co-founder Dhiraj Mukherjee. Charities already on board with onHand include The Red Cross, RNIB, Guide Dogs, Water Aid, and the British Heart Foundation, and we expect to see many more discovering the benefit of the startup in the near future.
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Published on: 7th February 2023
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