I want to volunteer, I just don’t know where to start

I used to hear that all the time. When I was a college student it hit me that I could pull out my phone and DoorDash dinner from my bed, book an Airbnb across the world, or even use Fiverr to get my final paper edited. But if I wanted to volunteer for a local organization? Nothing. If I wanted to do something good, I had to play phone tag with a very sweet grandma that ran the community kitchen. And for young people, phone tag is a deal breaker.

So I built POINT to create an easy starting point to volunteer locally. But POINT quickly grew from just an app into a full-blown volunteer management platform.

Why?

Because I started meeting with hundreds of nonprofit leaders to introduce them to POINT and I realized that nearly all of them were women. Women were making change and leading local communities but they all were saying the same thing: they didn’t have the right technology they needed. Either volunteer management tech was crazy expensive, outdated, or some had given up on tech entirely and were left working off of spreadsheets. Women were spending hours, even days, doing manual data entry that took time away from their valuable work in our communities. Truthfully, I thought I was going to launch a volunteer app and then go become the doctor my parents wanted me to be. But here I am, years later (still not a doctor), because…

The disparity of nonprofit tech became a clear issue of gender inequality.

Hundreds of women told me they were consistently ignored by tech companies when they reported issues, requests or needed support. Some platforms had not improved or changed to meet their needs in 5+ years but homeless shelters, community kitchens, anti-human trafficking agencies, you name it, were still being charged thousands. And the kicker was that almost all the platforms on the market were run by men, but nearly all the users were women. I wanted to build the incredible women I had met the tools they asked for, and do what other tech companies weren’t: take them seriously and listen.

When we don’t give our women leaders the tools they need,
our community doesn’t receive the help it needs.