Grant Applicant: Community Bucket

The feature below is brought to you by Community Bucket, an organization that is in the running to receive a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about all of our giving initiatives, please click here. 

To learn more about Community Bucket, please visit their website page: here.

Filling the bucket.

A more beautiful community.

We believe in the power of action. Better yet, we believe in the power of collective action.

This vision of the world - that volunteering can be a great catalyst for building strong communities - is what led us to start Community Bucket on a hot, humid August day in 2012.

Atlanta, a city of transplants, has never been a stranger to social consciousness and activism. There is no shortage of organizations and individuals who are working toward strengthening the city for everyone. Despite this reality, we noticed a gap: few opportunities for young adults to give back.

Like ourselves, young adults in their 20s and 30s have too few opportunities for giving back locally and designed for their lifestyles. We have the free time on our hands, we have the desire in our hearts, and we have the skills to add value, so why is it so hard to find great opportunities to volunteer?

Community Bucket is built on the promise of Service Made Social. Volunteers are asked to give up a few hours on a weekend to serve with local nonprofits. In turn, we promise to deliver a quality and rewarding experience that allows them to make great friends and make an impact. This emphasis on the “social” was traditionally missing from many volunteer opportunities. It has proven to be the glue that has kept our community growing.

The results continue to inspire us even today!

Everyday young professionals turn volunteering into a hobby.

Grassroots nonprofits flourish thanks to a steady stream of quality volunteers to speed up their work.

People, especially those new to their city, find community and feel connected to the place they call home.

Friendships and relationships naturally blossom.

The beauty truly lies in the countless volunteers (more than 3,000 just in Atlanta today) who have joined our community. We might provide the platform to make it easy and accessible, but it requires selflessly showing up to make any real impact.

Picture a scene like this one:

It’s a damp and chilly Saturday morning in February. Our team is anxiously preparing and tying up loose ends so we can start the park cleanup on schedule – 9:00 am. At 8:25, the first few volunteers trickle in, and before we know it, 105 people have checked in. They stand around the main table, chatting or enjoying coffee as music is playing overhead. Whatever it takes to get people pumped up this early, we are on it. The energy is infectious. People are ready to get their hands dirty and their boots muddy. They didn’t come to sit around, after all!

An event like the one mentioned collectively logs 250 hours of volunteer time for our nonprofit partner. That’s equivalent to six weeks of a full-time employee, accomplished in a single morning. And that doesn’t even measure the meaningful connections and bonds formed between volunteers in the course of the morning.

So, why do we share this with you, and what keeps us going? For us, it’s our belief in the beauty of the Service Made Social promise. As we see it, beauty is more than something you enjoy; it’s something that inspires you on a deeper level than what meets the eye.

Beauty is someone avoiding the snooze button to wake up on a sleepy Saturday and go serve in the community, by choice!

Beauty is the sight of hundreds of volunteers standing together and looking on excitedly as they wait to get to work.

Beauty is the passion streaming through the volunteer coordinator’s voice as she captures the purpose for her nonprofit’s work and the important benefits of each volunteer’s effort.

Beauty is in knowing that more people who crave real community can actually find it.

Beauty is in watching the transformative effect of people putting more good deeds into the world, day after day.

This is the vision that guides our growth. As we deepen our impact in the Atlanta community, we are also taking this promise “on the road” by expanding into three more cities in 2019: Denver, New York City, and Austin. We believe that young professionals everywhere can benefit from the promise of Service Made Social. We believe that volunteering is a catalyst for connecting communities.

With the efforts of many, we can all continue building a more beautiful community. And we invite you to join in on the fun!

If you share our vision of beauty, we would love to hear from you. You can learn more at www.communitybucket.com or email us at [email protected].

Written by:

Jacey Lucus, President of the Community Bucket Board