The Covid-19 pandemic crisis has increased the need for the services provided by our area’s nonprofits while concurrently reducing the resources they have available to meet these needs, whether that be financial or volunteer resources. One group of leaders has launched an effort to bridge the gap between our nonprofits and our community members who want to help, initiating an online platform called Tampa Bay CARES (http://tampabay.svpcares.org) to catalog as many nonprofits as possible in the Tampa Bay region.
The Tampa Bay Chapter of Social Venture Partners—an international philanthropy movement that pairs charitable giving with charitable doing—launched the CARES site in late April, and to date has logged over 300 nonprofits. “We’re in a perfect storm for nonprofit challenges: interrupted fundraising cycles, stay-at-home orders and closures, and increased needs of community members. As soon as our local chapter heard of the CARES platform we knew it was the right fit for our region to help mitigate these challenges,” noted Irv Cohen, chair of the Tampa Chapter of SVP and member of the organization’s international governing board.
SVP’s efforts on this are joined by community leaders including the Community Foundation of Tampa Bay, which not only serves as the institutional partner for the SVP chapter but also has actively promoted the system and aided in the initiative to get nonprofits into the system. Nonprofit organizations can independently create profiles and update their data on an ongoing basis; SVP and Community Foundation of Tampa Bay staff have accelerated the process by assisting nonprofits in the entry process.
The goals of the project are unified around meeting the needs of nonprofits while also informing the community about needs they may not know about. While crisis response has served as the initial catalyst to launch the effort, Cohen notes that the vision is much larger than the Covid-19 focus. “We’re very much looking forward to a day when the ‘C’ in CARES can be changed to the word ‘Community,’ as what we’re building has the structure to transition into a comprehensive nonprofit marketplace after we’ve moved beyond crisis and are looking to sustain and renew our community,” he explained.
Tampa Bay is among the first community in the nation to adopt the CARES platform, which was developed by a technology entrepreneur who is also a founding member of the SVP Cincinnati chapter. During an April meeting of SVP partners nationally, the company that created the platform—Inspired Service–offered to extend their engagement tool used for volunteer matching and recruitment in Cincinnati, and to adapt it to the needs of crisis response. Since that meeting, over a dozen other communities have initiated the platform in their own regions.
The CARES platform can be found at http://tampabay.svpcares.org; to learn more about SVP or to get involved, please visit www.svptampabay.org.