OnHand: Uber for Volunteering
Scaling award winning innovation to matching vetted volunteers with older adults and vulnerable people who need help with simple tasks, including closer contact and in-home support such as light gardening, while providing important companionship.
About the project
onHand is an award winning volunteer matching solution, featured by the Evening Standard, The Telegraph, Metro, BBC Radio and the HuffPost. IBM describes us as an “Uber for Volunteering”. Our mission is to create exactly that: Uber for volunteering on a national scale – making it easier for vetted volunteers to give help, whilst making it fast and safe for people and organisations to receive help.
Today, onHand matches vetted volunteers with older adults and vulnerable people who need help with simple tasks such as shopping, medicine collection/drop offs, urgent errands and other essentials. By tapping into the sharing economy we can address one of society’s most pressing issues, at a fraction of the cost of today’s solutions and when NHS resources are most strained.
Prior to COVID-19, onHand’s volunteer matching platform had established itself as a disruptor to the care industry, using tech to simplify the way volunteers and older adults connect. The response to our platform has been applauded by various industry experts such as the National Innovation Centre for Ageing and across the media.
Our concept has been tested and proven in London by thousands of users including by the London Boroughs of Hammersmith & Fulham and Lambeth, who commissioned onHand to help their residents in light of the COVID-19 outbreak to great success and we have now begun pilots in further cities.
As an innovative yet small team, onHand needs investment to scale. Grant funding would allow us to invest in our technology and replicate our successes across the UK. This development will take us from helping 1000’s of vulnerable older adults in limited areas to helping 100’s of 1000’s across the country.
In a post COVID-19 world, we hope that onHand can resume providing a larger variety of tasks for older people who need help, including closer contact and in-home support such as light gardening, simple tasks around the house (like changing light-bulbs and taking the bins out) and basic companionship, all with a network of new volunteers who continue to give their time even after COVID-19. These are the types of services we successfully provided prior to the current crisis – delivering multiple 1000’s of hours of help in the last year.