
Ask HN: How do you go about finding charitable causes to contribute to? - pcprincipal
I would like to allocate a portion of my time to charitable causes but I&#x27;m not sure where to start. Ideally, I would leverage my skills as a programmer to help a good cause and the work would be interesting.
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jppope
First You are Awesome for wanting to help out!

Second I'll let you know that this is actually incredibly difficult. Generally
speaking NPO (503Cs)aren't set up for technical volunteering. so you will have
to search a little. They generally default to paying consultants mainly due to
just a complete lack of familiarity.

Here's a couple of strategies:

\- find a charity that you are interested in volunteering to. Charity
Navigator keeps tabs on them and you can find a charity that fits what you are
looking for. Email them and hopefully they will contact you about helping.

\- Reach out to whatever University is in the area. The computer science
department will often get requests for help with pro-bono projects... they can
probably put you in touch with the right person/ project.

\- [https://www.donatecode.com/](https://www.donatecode.com/)

\- Open source! Don't forget about open source projects. they need love too

\- Organize Charity hackathons and get people together (Here's one we ran that
was enjoyably successful: [https://www.meetup.com/IPAs-and-
APIs/events/249340851/](https://www.meetup.com/IPAs-and-
APIs/events/249340851/))

and lastly if you want to give us a hand we'd love some help
([https://github.com/jppope/academic-
intervention](https://github.com/jppope/academic-intervention) ). We're
working on a project to help reproducibility and open access in science. We
work on the project every Thursday night after work. We have a couple of PhD
candidates advising and a small team of coders working on the build.

Hopefully these suggestions help! I've had similar problems trying to give my
time and technical skills away for a good cause, so I feel your challenge.

~~~
pcprincipal
Thank you so much! This is great advice and I'm excited to look into the links
you posted. Appreciate you taking the time :-).

