FREEPORT, Illinois — The Freeport City Council approved a partnership this week with NonProfitTHRIVE.com that will help residents build up community service hours and the city to track civic engagement.
NonProfitTHRIVE is a Freeport-based company that created an online platform to match volunteers with nonprofits and automatically track those hours. The goal is to help nonprofits connect with potential supporters in the modern way: through their phones. The tracking feature helps organizations that encourage or require community service and potential college students looking to burnish an application a one-click way of collecting those hours.
“Freeport is a wonderful community that really cares,” NonProfitTHRIVE founder Nicole Sdao said. “This will allow Freeport to track how much time its employees and citizens put into to helping one another. This will help with job attraction and in grant applications. I’m thrilled that Freeport is the first city to see the possibilities.”
Nancy McDonald, Freeport’s economic and community development director, is eager to explore the ways NonProfitTHRIVE can help the city.
“The city of Freeport is excited to support a local business owner and certainly look forward to engaging more with area nonprofits,” McDonald said. “Additionally, we intend to use NonProfitTHRIVE to engage more with the citizens of Freeport as we utilize the system for volunteer projects for the city.”
NonProfitTHRIVE is a free service for nonprofits and volunteers. Community-minded people can open an account, put in preferences for the causes they want to help and receive alerts on their phones when a volunteer opportunity opens up. Nonprofits can post volunteer opportunities, and NonProfitTHRIVE streamlines the screening process.
NonProfitTHRIVE was developed with Thinker Ventures of Rockford. It was launched in 2016 with the goal of being a national platform to connect volunteers and nonprofits. The momentum is building: Since its launch, more than 47,000 volunteer hours have been recorded. The number of volunteers joining the site increased 90 percent since Nov. 1 while the number of nonprofit opportunities has increased 64 percent.
NonProfitTHRIVE, matching the skills of volunteers with the needs of nonprofits.
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If you’d like to learn more about NonProfitTHRIVE or the Freeport partnership, contact Nancy McDonald at nmcdonald@cityoffreeport.org, Jodi Miller at jmiller@cityoffreeport.org or Nicole Sdao of NonProfitTHRIVE at Nicole@nonprofitthrive.com.
Alex Gary(https://www.facebook.com/AlexGaryCI/)