I was first exposed to community work in my childhood, having grown up as a Legacy Ward, and the amazing opportunities afforded to me as a boy by Legacy and Australia’s Special Air Service have never been forgotten. However, while I had continued to do some sporadic volunteer work, it wasn’t until 2010 when my two and a half year-old godson Elliot was diagnosed with brain cancer that the not-for-profit (NFP) sector was brought back to the forefront of my mind.

Elliot lost his battle in February 2011, and Elliot’s father, Rick Parish, along with Peter Wilson founded The Telethon Adventurers to wage a ‘War on Cancer’. The organisation has become a real success story, raising over $6 million in Western Australia (WA) since late 2010 with virtually no overheads.

Following the loss of my godson and after what had proven to be a frantic, albeit incredibly rewarding career period, I took a sabbatical in 2011 to spend a month living and working in an orphanage in Mexico. It was a desperately confronting experience, but one that further defined my thinking around how not-for-profits (NFPs) should operate.

Upon my return, a good friend approached me with the idea of organising our group of friends to get together, and we just happened to do some volunteering in the process. From the subsequent conversations with friends, colleagues, and family, it became apparent that while many people were eager to volunteer a few hours, they found it difficult to do so as the majority of opportunities available required waiting lists, long-term commitment or prohibitive application processes. This concept inspired the mission behind Community Mates: to connect people, businesses and charities with the aim of making volunteering social and easy, and provide a way for people to contribute their time rather than funds.

Budding success

In September 2012, the organisation was founded armed simply with the aim to remove any hurdle that would stop or slow down someone interested in volunteering. We are willing to support virtually any NFP – from the local tennis club to a medical research charity or an environmental cause. Our only focus is to get people to contribute their time, and we seek nothing in return. We do not charge volunteers, we do not charge charities. Instead of thrusting a model on our volunteers, we offer options and encourage people to engage as they wish and largely on their terms, whether that be for an hour a year or an hour every week.

Whilst Community Mates is still in its early days, we have already supported 25 charities at over 40 events, in Western Australia, New South Wales, South Australia, Austria, Guatemala and Dubai, with over 120 discrete volunteers who collectively have contributed over 900 volunteer hours. Our footprint is growing rapidly with 21 chapters in eight countries, and we expect to clock 2,500 volunteer hours by year end.

Equally impressive is that this has all been achieved on a total budget of less than $100 to date.

A corporate and teamwork-oriented approach

The concept is simple, and I believe our good fortune and successes to date are completely due to our team whose ideas and combined actions are building Community Mates. Our focus is on how to get people to volunteer, to introduce NFPs to the public, and to support NFPs however we can but as an organisation we take a very corporate approach to our strategic planning, strategic alignment and performance measurement.

Breaking this down, our view is that our value chain is of volunteers being our customers with NFPs being our suppliers of opportunity. Our value proposition in effect is to act as a no-cost brokerage, allocating resources and actively seeking to promote and improve market efficiency through facilitation, delivery method and communication sophistication. In addition to this, we aim to actively ‘grow the pie’ by putting in place a model where new volunteers join in on the fun, and where NFPs can reduce costs by lowering their volunteer acquisition efforts whilst ensuring consistent volunteer supply, therefore allowing them to focus on improving and expanding their efforts in their core focus areas.

Rather than carry overheads, we actively seek support from experts and expert firms only as required, allowing our total focus to be on efficiency and effectiveness. To this end, we have been supported by a number of amazing partners including Grant Thornton, Clayton Utz, and Ignite Design and Creative, with each being truly instrumental to our success.

We are constantly brainstorming ideas for mutually beneficial strategic partnerships. An example of this is our collaboration with the incredibly forward-thinking Rockingham City Council (RCC) in WA. Together we have developed a model that will work in partnership with RCC’s existing efforts whilst leveraging off of Community Mates’ approach with the aim of engaging more of the RCC’s citizens in volunteering. While this is still in its infancy, this is something we hope to be able to roll out to other progressive councils in the very near term.

However, Community Mates’ continued success really comes down to our team and extraordinary volunteers. One great example is Elaine Moore, who chose to celebrate her 30th birthday by volunteering with Community Mates to march in the Mardi Gras on behalf of beyondblue. Another is Simon Prout, who dedicated his recent mountain climb of Aconcaqua in Argentina to increase awareness of Community Mates. Simon is also a member of our WA Executive Committee.

Looking into the future

Our efforts to date have simply been a pilot allowing us opportunity to refine our model and approach, to understand how this framework can work, and to develop and test the necessary tools to allow scalability. The coming year will be incredibly exciting and a real test of how quickly we can grow our team and reach, source new volunteers and get more people volunteering.

It really is just the beginning for us and we would love for any interested people and organisations to join us on our journey. Together we will change the world, one community at a time.