Tulsa residents wanting to help their community have a new way to find volunteer opportunities.
The website for Serve Tulsans is now online.
"We have a lot of Tulsans who want to play a part, want to help out, but don't necessarily know where the opportunities are," said Mayor G.T. Bynum. "So, this is a first-of-its-kind website for us at the city that we've put live where people can identify those opportunities for service."
The website allows people to search for volunteer opportunities in the city by area of need, interest, skills or age group. Working In Neighborhoods Director Dwain Midget said before the site launched, the city had been successful finding volunteers with help from faith-based organizations.
"But this was to institutionalize this effort, which is what we need, and give — on a broader scale — give citizens an opportunity to identify projects they want to work on," Midget said.
Though not many opportunities were live as of Monday afternoon, more will be added. There will be opportunities to help out with things the WIN Department commonly gets requests for.
"There's an elderly [woman] in the neighborhood, and she needs a wheelchair ramp, you know. How do we get volunteers, for instance, to help with those sort of things?" Midget said. "Or we have trash, junk and debris that they need assistance with removal. How do we get volunteers to do that?"
The Serve Tulsans volunteer portal is funded through private contributions as part of the City of Tulsa’s partnership with Cities of Service, a nonprofit started in 2009 by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
