In addition to all of the studying, working, arguing with a friend, and endless studying for next week’s test, we sometimes have the desire to do something meaningful. Turns out, this isn’t as simple as it sounds. We don’t always find an activity that we connect with, and don’t always find a place to volunteer that’s close to home or where other young people volunteer. This is the exact problem that OneDay Social Volunteering seeks to solve. OneDay Social Volunteering was founded and run by Elad Blumenthal, a 2017 MBA graduate.
Every month, OneDay publicizes a schedule of volunteer activities; the listings include various forms of volunteering in various locales nationwide, and is open to the general public. There’s no long-term commitment; volunteers can come once and try it out. Yet most of the volunteers love it and continue volunteering.
A little about Elad
Elad, 33, lives in Rishon LeZion and holds a BA in public health from Ben-Gurion University and an MBA with a specialization in Marketing from Hebrew University.
“Every place that I wanted to volunteer at required a commitment of a set number of hours a week or a year. As a member of Gen-Y, no word cares more than I do about commitment, especially when I was a student with limited time.”
“I thought, ‘How I can, despite the challenges, volunteer? I then gathered a few friends and we decided to pack food packages before the holidays for anyone who needed food. On the one hand, this was meaningful for all of us, and on the other hand, it gave us an opportunity to get to know each other in a different light. After that, another person in the friend group who loves animals suggested that we volunteer with animals the next month, and OneDay grew from there.”
“The first time we volunteered, we were about twenty friends who knew each other going in, and by the second time we’d already doubled. Volunteering became a kind of a social circle that expanded, through friends who brought friends, and through it we got a chance to meet more people.”
OneDay Social Volunteering
Elad took a leap of faith and officially established OneDay in 2018-19, and today it has 35,000 volunteers registered in its database. OneDay organizes about 350 volunteer activities a year, with the age range of the volunteers being 18-35. The goal is to create some commonality between the volunteers, so that the volunteering itself will also be a social gathering.
Elad says that the organization’s volunteers include Arabs, Jews, immigrants, religious, secular, and, when the borders are open, tourists. “We wanted, through joint volunteering, to create a connection between various people, even if it’s for one day. Today, every volunteer activity has long waiting lists, and 80% of the volunteers who come for one-time volunteering, come back again and again.”
“I think we’re one of the only organizations who cares about the volunteers just as much as we care about the volunteering. We don’t look only at the result, but also at the volunteering experience. We want people to go home and feel like they did something meaningful that day, but also for them to feel like they really enjoyed themselves.”
OneDay offers a wide range of activities, including volunteering with the elderly, Holocaust survivors, children with special needs, at-risk youth, home and institution construction, social services, and beach cleanups. The goal is for everyone to find a “volunteer gig” to which they connect, and join that community of volunteers.
The encounter between a university student and those with practical, “real-life” experience can be intimidating. However, Elad was not daunted: He knew how to live up to his potential, and took with him a meaningful toolkit:
“It is not a coincidence that I jumped into the water within a year after finishing my degree. Through my MBA in Marketing, I took courses that are still relevant to me today, such as the advertising, business plan development, employee recruitment, and HR management. My attitude today has developed largely owing to the tools I gained in my studies; I approach our volunteers as clients, and accordingly we must treat our volunteers as we treat clients and give them a good volunteering experience.”
Organization Management: A business for everything
“Thanks to my MBA, I understand that a non-profit should conduct itself as a business, in contrast to how most non-profits in Israel function today. While OneDay is a non-profit, in terms of value, marketing, model, managerially and financially, it must be run as a business. One of the lessons I learned is not to rely on donations only, but to also engage in a lot of collaborations with the business sector. One of our most successful projects, which we started in 2019 and is among the most successful in Israel today, is recruitment days from small start-ups to high-tech and huge corporations. This project includes volunteering activities tailored to the company in a way that they will find meaningful.”
Elad recommends to students who are nearing graduation “to take the tools that you’ve gained in academia seriously, and to try and apply them to the workplace. You can always get advice from the wonderful lecturers at the Business School, and to this day I still ask for advice.”