Chatting with Sophia from SDSN Youth

Sophia Huynh is the Program Director for SDSN Youth, the Youth counterpart to academic research network SDSN. Dedicated to helping power the conversation around the Sustainable Development Goals, SDSN Youth focuses on research around policy and educating young people to take actionable steps towards sustainable solutions. Sophia’s role as Program Director has her oversee the Youth organisation and it’s three flagship programs; Cities, University Students and Entrepreneurship. As a volunteer-based organisation, SDSN Youth looks to skilled professionals willing to donate their time and expertise in order to shape the continued growth of their network, and inspire young people to access information that empowers them to make a difference. Naturally, Vollie has entered the chat.

Sophia recalls coming across Vollie when seeking a solution for skill-based projects that SDSN Youth were looking to tackle. “I was quite surprised by the people who would apply,” she says. “With one of our projects, one of our applicants was the director of a design agency. I was quite surprised that someone who was probably very busy was willing to spend time to work pro bono with us - I think that was one of the first key moments where I thought, wow, there’s obviously a great pool of candidates here.”

Sophia’s words echo a sentiment often heard in the NFP space - are there really skilled pros out there willing to volunteer and donate their time? Every organisation dreams of a perfectly qualified candidate willing to work pro bono falling into their lap, with ‘dreams’ being the operative word here. So was it a fluke experience? In fact, far from it.

“It’s - what’s that phrase - the gift that keeps on giving!” laughs Sophia, “We were posting more projects and kept getting people like that,”

“There was one who was the COO of a very big, national not-for-profit who helped us with operational strategy advice, and for another strategic project we got a manager at a very big insurance firm. Just looking at the calibre of people, I was like - wow! This is great, this is everything that we want, and it works out quite well for us.”

Sophia also touches on one of Vollie’s defining features; it’s focus on short-term projects. It’s a feature that encourages volunteer commitment in our increasingly prevalent gig economy, and is par for the course now that so many jobs have been reshaped to function remotely thanks to ‘working from home’ restrictions. Sophia notes that SDSN Youth, like many non-profit organisations, traditionally seeks out volunteers for 12 month roles. As a consequence, the long-term nature of these volunteer stints often sees a drop-off after some time has passed. “Life catches up and we don’t have time, but the typical amount of time they would stay for would be around 3-6 months”, she explains.

“What was nice about Vollie was that the expectation was clear that it would be short-term, and you could decide together what would actually fit their schedule.” 

Having access to a database of skilled volunteers is a weapon every not-for-profit should have in their arsenal, and without one, organisations can find themselves falling short of their goals. For NFPs, money commonly needs to be spent on direct aid to their cause. It means that volunteer work is often the only option when it comes to running other areas of the organisation - whether that’s marketing, admin, IT, operations, and so on. For many organisations this results in a lot of bootstrapping and unfortunately, holding off on much-needed changes and upgrades their organisation needs to function - ultimately hindering organisational growth.

“There have been a lot of projects where - and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case for a number of other not-for-profits - you delay very specific streams of work because you can’t find the people. Now I don’t feel like I have to postpone them, and when we’re ready we can just post and probably find someone”, Sophia says.

“When we’re looking for people with that sort of strategic skill set or something that’s really unique, I’ll tell the team to look at Vollie first.”

For non-profits with a long list of things they wish they could get done but don’t have the means to, Vollie is the solution. With such a broad range of skilled volunteers seeking opportunities to give back, posting a project on the Vollie marketplace is a shortcut to organisational growth and improvement.

“Having Vollie there means that we can expand the diversity of people we want to reach, it means that we no longer have to freak out when we need to find someone with very specific marketing skill sets”, says Sophia. 

“We know that this is a channel that has proven to be very reliable for us, and we’ll continue to use it in the future.”