Founded 2009 | ||
Catchafire
Catchafire is a New York-based for-profit organization which makes skill-based connections between professional volunteers and other non-profits. It was founded in 2009 by Rachael Chong, a former investment banker with UBS.
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Volunteers with any of a wide variety of skills can browse Catchafire to find short-term projects which match their specific talents. Catchafire has been explicitly compared with matchmaking or dating websites. Catchafire charges its nonprofit subscribers a fee for matching a project with a volunteer.
Chong has said she was inspired to start Catchafire by her experience volunteering for a house-building project in The Bronx, which left her financial and banking skills "untapped," requiring her instead to haul lumber around a building site. "We're matching what people do in their day-to-day lives with the opportunity to apply those amazing skills to a non-profit that truly needs it," she has said.