How To Volunteer And Donate Online In Singapore

Giving and kindness can take many forms. From small daily acts of kindness to volunteering your time to help someone else, every action matters in making this world a better place.

With technology being an integral part of our lives now, there are many different platforms and websites currently available for you to volunteer or donate in the comfort of your homes, and today, we are going to check some of them out!

SG United was set up this year in Singapore as a portal for Singaporeans who are looking to support community efforts for the COVID-19 outbreak.

On this website, you can gain access to many platforms where you can either volunteer your time to charities that need manpower for their initiatives or donate to different campaigns like those that provide support to staff in healthcare institutions. You can even fundraise or start your own volunteering or donation programme!

It is really easy to support a campaign over here. You just have to click on “donate to support the vulnerable”, and the website will display a few different funds where you can donate to. By clicking on it, it goes to giving.sg, a government-backed platform where you can choose from many funds to donate to with just a few simple clicks! And worry not about the safety of donating here as they use a top-of-the-line security certified data centre to ensure your information is kept safe and secure.

Next up, we have It’s Raining Rain Coats, an initiative started in 2015 aiming to spread kindness to migrant workers in Singapore!

During this difficult time, they have expanded their help in many different ways like having hand sanitizer donation drives, where all items will be sent to the migrant workers’ dormitories!

They have also started to provide free English lessons to these migrant workers through video calls! This encourages the workers to stay indoors as much as possible while also being able to learn basic English from the volunteer teachers provided by them.

NTUC Shop and Donate is a great platform where you are able to make in-kind donations by shopping for items online on NTUC and they will have them delivered straight to your prefered beneficiary organizations.

However, they recently just announced that their platform is currently unavailable.

Next up, we have 2 platforms that use your location to help identify people near you who might need help.

MaskGoShare is a website by better.sg where you can donate masks or hand-sanitizers to someone near you. Besides that, it is a platform where you can also ask for help if you need masks, sanitizers and essentials.

There are 3 parts to this website. One where you can search for help requests nearest to your neighbourhood by typing in your postal code, another where you can ask for help if you need supplies for you or your family by leaving a request.

Lastly, they even have a map of all 1 and 2-bedroom HDB rental flats in Singapore and you can use this to find the blocks nearest to you and leave a gift in their mailbox. Buildings with 1-bedroom flats are highlighted in red.

The 2nd platform is GoodHood SG, a ground-up initiative that goes beyond the essentials connecting neighbours kampung-style. All you need to do is to download their app, and you’re good to go!

When you sign up, you will be connected with real neighbours around your estate. If you are concerned about privacy, no other address or contact info will be shown, except for your neighbourhood.

On this app, you are able to request & offer help, give, receive & exchange items, and even list your services for free! And! The app is really easy to use and it allows you to post, comment and chat directly, so that every neighbour can seek or offer help effectively from or for the right people!

Folding@home is a project focusing on disease research. With its software, you are able to share your unused computer processing power with researchers to help with the intensive research of several diseases, including the COVID-19 virus.

These researchers tend to face many problems with computer processing power as their research requires so many computer calculations that their computers alone are unable to handle.

The Folding@home software runs and works to help with the research of cures while your computer is turned on and connected to an active internet. You can still continue to use your computer normally while it is running, with almost negligible impact on your computer’s speed!

All you need to do is download the Folding@home client and install it, and it’s ready for use!

This is a global epidemic that we are facing and we need every single person in this world to chip in. And chip in we can – Virtually. A small disclaimer, you can still do all this after the circuit breaker.

With all these donations and volunteering platforms available online, everyone can do a small part by using these convenient tools to help in their own ways during this period. Every little gesture counts!

This is part of the SG United Content Series supported by IMDA. Let’s stay hopeful and stay united! #SGUnited #StayHealthyGoDigital.