What would you do if you were given the opportunity to utilize 10 volunteers every month? What about every week? What about 100 volunteers on one day?

Chicago Cares partners with community organizations, schools and parks in various ways throughout the year. Our staff works with each organization or school to identify its most pressing needs and then creates and manages a project or series of projects that put volunteers to work meeting those needs in a meaningful way. The projects are lead by trained volunteer leaders and staffed by Chicago Cares volunteers.

Our unique model of volunteerism provides community service organizations, schools and other agencies with the power of thousands of volunteers every year! Click here for a complete overview of Chicago Cares and how we work with our community partners.

How does it work?
To address the critical needs of our community, we partner with schools, parks and social service agencies in four ways. We've made it easy for you - just complete one application for automatic consideration for one or all of our program models.

Ongoing Programs: Chicago Cares creates, manages and leads more than 200 ongoing service projects every month. Any individual volunteer may sign up with our trained Team Coordinator and attend the project. These projects take place at our partner agencies on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis in the evenings on Monday through Thursday or on weekends.

Serve-a-thon and Celebration of Service: At these city-wide projects, Chicago Cares mobilizes thousands of volunteers to make a dramatic difference in just one day. The Celebration of Service is in January and the Serve-a-thon is in June. Specific project times can vary, but volunteers would be at your site for several hours on a Saturday.

Business Shares: Chicago Cares creates customized one-time service projects for corporate or private groups who want to improve their community. The projects take place on weekdays, evenings or weekends and are led by Chicago Cares staff and trained volunteer leaders.

Youth in Service: Chicago Cares designs, implements and oversees one-time and ongoing service projects tailored specifically for youth volunteers. These projects are weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or one-time and the community partner must be able to accommodate volunteers ages 8 to 18.

Typically, it takes us a few weeks to process your application. We will follow-up when an opportunity to meet your site's needs is available. We cannot accommodate all applications we receive, but we do store application data and the best way to be sure your site will be considered is to have an application on file with us.

What are the parameters for partnering with Chicago Cares?

• All of our projects involve hands-on work; we don't complete office work, fundraising or assistance with special events like walks or runs

• With the exception of a few projects each year, all programming occurs within the City of Chicago.

• A member of your staff must participate in the development of the project or program and be on site during the project; this person should be prepared to take part in the brief volunteer welcome and wrap-up.

To learn more about Chicago Cares and the volunteer work we do throughout the city, download our fact sheet here.