The current manner in which opportunities for the completion of community service are identified, and the process of scheduling and logging of completed community service hours, is largely manual, cumbersome and ineffective.

Students/Parents

Students, and by default their parents, are required to contact accredited charities (across various categories such as the disabled, children, senior citizens, animals etc.) and arrange times to accumulate community service hours as part of the compulsory LO curriculum. Usually they rely on the experience and recommendations from other parents or older students to obtain details of charities and activities. Schools sometimes provide limited information or guidelines to parents.

Charities

Not all charities have the resources to engage with schools or students to ensure that their needs are matched with the students’ availability or capability. Popular charities are often overbooked, especially during the end of the year when the deadline for students’ community service hours become due. There is currently no mobile digital platform through which all charities can list their organisation, create awareness and update information or manage their requests for assistance (either in volunteering opportunities or donations), as and when they are needed.

Schools

Some schools provide a list of popular charities or those located near the school, but this list is static and does not identify specific needs or list all potential community service opportunities. While community hours are required by the LO curriculum, this tends to be more a “tick-the-box” approach, rather than maximising the impact for the charity and the students.

Students/parents

Students/parents are required to contact the charities themselves, usually via a phone call or email to arrange a suitable time to book their hours. This often falls to parents to schedule as they need to arrange these appointments to fit in with their own schedules and/or organise transport.

Charities

The charities are encouraged to utilise the help offered by these pupils by giving them various activities/chores. This requires administrative resources from the charity to communicate and schedule these appointments with the students/parents. Scheduling and managing the students and/or volunteers is haphazard at best and reliant on the resource capacity at each charity.

Students/parents

The charities sign the pupils’ community service hours form (often a paper template provided by the school) indicating the date and number of hours worked, the description of the activity and the details of the charity. Charities seldom keep a detailed register of students and/or volunteers and their hours. If the manual form is lost, it is very difficult to recreate and verify the hours.

Charities

The scheduling of appointments and subsequent confirmation of completed hours is an administrative challenge for most charities. It is a manual process which varies between charities, again dependent on resource constraints and administrative capabilities.

Schools

The manual sheets are captured by an administrator or teacher to combine and confirm hours per student. If hours are verified by either the school or independently, it is a manual and tedious task, with no guarantee of accuracy.

There is no continuity of reporting from 1 year to the next.

Schools rely on the students and parents to manage the community service hours required during a period. Typically there is no ongoing monitoring or reporting that would ensure meaningful community and charity engagement, and ensure that hours are not left to be completed in the last week before a deadline.

Chalk it Up has developed an interactive digital platform with a mobile app as the primary user interface. The platform allows charities to promote their work, request assistance in the form of hours (students and/or volunteers from the community) or donations (community or corporates). It lets users engage, schedule appointments, log and track completed hours and provides automated reporting to the users and 3rd parties (schools).

Chalk it Up therefore provides a simple and effective way for charities to promote themselves and manage their available hours. Students are easily able to identify charities, and book and record community service hours in an effective, orderly and consistent manner. Schools are provided a platform with which to effortlessly authenticate, record and report on students’ community service hours.

Once registered, the user’s information is always available and profiles can be reactivated at any time. If students are required to prove their community hours served (e.g. medical students, or for bursaries, or curriculum vitae), validated reports are always available. Access to information is unlimited and functionality is free to use for all registered users.